Laptops

We have a new laptop. It cost us $699 at Office Works. Well, actually it cost $799, and then I had to send a form off to Compaq to get a $100 rebate. I don't know why they buggerise around with these things. Why now just give us the cheap laptop?

What do you get for a $700 laptop? Well, you get something that is quite adequate for sitting on the couch and blogging on. It's got a 15 inch screen, a hard drive that is 10 times larger than we need, and a processor that seems fast enough for now. It's not overly light, but then it is not significantly heavier than the others that were on sale - it's a bit under 3 kg. I don't know about battery life, but I suspect that like all laptops, it is a lot less than what they advertise. If we get an hour out of the battery, I will be happy.

The main apps that we'll be using on it are a browser, Outlook and maybe Word. It doesn't need to be the most powerful beast ever invented. It just needs to be able to run a browser, which it does quite well.

My only gripe is the lack of RAM, and you can't buy extra RAM at Office Works. It came with 512MB, so I need to take it to a local computer shop to buy another 512MB. The instructions that it came with of course say nothing about the type of RAM that's already installed, so I will have to take it to the shop, open it up and see if they have something similar.

I even had a look at the Compaq web site, and it tells me nothing either. Why can't they give you a list of part numbers so you can just ring up and say, "send me a unit of XYZ".

Idiots.