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The Laptop Crisis Is Over

Oh Moore’s Law. You might be running out of steam, but you still deliver.

As you know, because I have been whining about it constantly on this site, my old trusty laptop has been killing power cords in a particularly brutal fashion. I’ve been looking for a replacement, and have been forced to use an HP Mini 1000 Netbook in its place. This experience inspired the latest run of comics.

When I bought the old laptop I dropped about $1600 on it. It’s a few years old but it still runs everything quite well. I assumed that I’d have to spend something similar in order to replace it.

I was, as it turns out, wrong. This weekend I found a more than serviceable replacement for $700.

Behold my new laptop.

It is superior to my old laptop in nearly every way: better graphics processor, i5 Dual-core processor, RAM expandible to 8GB, space for two hard drives instead of one, more external connectors. The only deficit is in screen resolution. My old laptop had 1680×1080 resolution, this one can only manage 1600×900. The change in resolution is noticeable but not maddeningly so.

It’s a relief to type on a full-sized keyboard again (though the keyboard layout is slightly different from my old computer, so there is still some adjustment there). It’s not quite ready for full-time use yet, because it doesn’t have Linux on it yet (I’m going keep Windows on the first drive and put Linux on the second drive because I anticipate having Windows available will be useful for work) but I have Inkscape and Gimp on Windows and can start publishing comics normally again.

I bought it at Sam’s Club, which means it’s a consumer-grade laptop, not a high-end, gaming laptop, yet it outclasses my old laptop, which at the time was a high-end, gaming laptop.

Insanity. Convenient for me, though.

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