Magic
I have always found laptops fascinating. When I got my first proper PC back in 1999 for university I was fascinated by them too but they made a lot more sense to me, big modular boxes with lots of components, lots of room for them to breath, all hooked up to a huge monitor and a minimum of a mouse and a keyboard (wires everywhere). Laptops on the other hand have been almost as powerful as their large scale siblings, everything you need in one device and a battery so you can play with them anywhere you want. Magic!
The First
My first laptop was bought in 2005 when I moved to Amsterdam but unfortunately was anything but magical. It was my only computer at the time, I had the idea of 'travelling light' between England and the Netherlands but it ended up never actually coming with me on the plane because it was still too big and heavy. In my greed I bought a 17" desktop replacement with a very capable graphics card. I tried getting one from 'Rock Direct' and 'Mesh' who both guaranteed they would be able to make one up for me before I had to move out of the country but they are both a bunch of lying scum bags who just wanted my money, needless to say I will never deal either of them again! Actually I think Mesh are history now *grins with delight*, I wonder if it had anything to do with the way they were told to blatantly lie to their customers... hmm. Anyway the one I ended up getting at a shop in Amsterdam was just wrong for me. It was too big, hot and heavy for a start. It was also not very comfortable to use and had terrible battery life. It sent me flying back to desktop PCs so hard that I didn't think about laptops again until I moved back to England in 2009. I really wanted a 2nd computer, mostly for my wife, something either of us could use anywhere in the house. I wanted another laptop but i could not afford one, which is where this beast comes in to the story.
The Beast
This is a Dell Inspiron 8200. It was my brother's and dates back to 2002. He's since moved on to a newer Dell as well as a netbook for portability so he kindly donated the trusty old Inspiron to us. OK so its 44mm thick, weighs nearly 4Kg, lasts about 2 minutes on battery, has a big card sticking out the side for wi-fi (g) and a hard drive smaller than my micro SD card but I have to say... we love it! It's reliable, the CPU and RAM are ok enough to slowly run Photoshop on Windows XP Pro, the screen is a brilliant non-glossy 1440x900 and the keys are nice. I hope laptops of today last as well as this has, after nearly 10 years it's still providing us some productivity. In human years of evolution this thing is about 20 million years old!
Aspirations
As much as I love this old Dell I also love new shiny gadgets and their evolution so inevitably I have been looking to replace the Inspiron 8200 with something a bit smaller. Something that I could travel with, something that could last a decent amount of time on it's battery and yet have some power when needed. I thought this would be tough so I started looking at the best equipment money could buy. Here are some that I nearly bought but couldn't quite live with because they weren't perfect for their rather huge asking prices...
What's wrong with this high spec portables you ask? Well the first 2 suffer from very lacklustre screens. The HP used ot have a very nice one called a 'radiance' display but dropped it for some reason and turned a well rounded machine in to a heavy paper weight where almost any other laptop is preferable, very poor show HP! Sony 'S' series displays are plane bad, even if you upgrade them to the higher 1600x900 resolution. they are mind numbingly dull and even have bad viewing angles when they are not glossy, damn Sony I didn't know that was possible with LED but you managed it, another well rounded spec utterly destroyed by a terrible screen! What killed most of these machines for me was ultimately the price but on top of taking away a dedicated graphics card while not giving back much in the way of battery life (Samsung / Lenovo). The Macbook Air and Toshiba disappeared from my list for not including a backlit keyboard, something that Apple has since fixed but was inexcusable to lose in the first place. Sony Vaio Z is pretty perfect, I almost went for this but the price again stopped me. It's not that I don't think it's worth it, I think Sony have done a great job with the new Z, I love the idea of the external graphics as an option when backed up by the HD3000 of the Intel chip and the amazing job they have done with the size and weight... Simply stunning, I just couldn't afford it.
The Good Bit
I had made peace with the fact that I couldn't have the Sony for quite a while but I soon started looking in to Laptops again. This time for my father who wanted a similar specifications to me (thin, light, good battery life, powerful enough for a bit of photo editing) but on a much smaller budget to the one I had previously been looking at. My first thoughts were "you'll be lucky, I can't find what I want for twice the price" but I soon started to find things that were very interesting. Some of these deals are slightly older machines trying to get sold off and some are new ones fighting for attention in the ever growing 'thin & light' category. If you can live without the ability to play games you can pretty much name your budget and get something that covers all of the classic criteria. For a little over £300 you can get a thin 13" machine with an 8 hour battery life and a nice keyboard. Go up to £450 and things really start to become interesting! I found two machines at this level so good that I had to buy them both. Why did I buy two laptops when I couldn't afford one? Well firstly the one was a Sony Vaio Z which starts at over £1400. For this price I could get three very interesting laptops and have enough left over to buy a mouse or two. So now my wife and I both have a new laptop to use and carry around. Here are the details for the two bargains that I found...
An 11.6" LED / glass screen, fast hard drive, switchable dedicated graphics card (capable of playing almost any game), a backlit keyboard (configurable to any colour). 64bit full Windows 7 machine weighing 2Kg with up to8 hours of battery.
A 13.3" edge to edge glass LED screen, 128GB SSD drive (boots in 30 seconds), solid aluminium chassis (behind the monitor as well), 18mm thick, ambient light sensor for screen and backlit keyboard. 64bit full Windows 7 machine weighing 1.75Kg with up to 5 hours of battery.
Both of these computers were a lot more expensive when they were new, The Adamo was £1500 and the M11x was £900. I thought that deals like this would be hard to find (unfortunately the Alienware deal has already ended) but there seem to be lots more where that came from, some full price machines almost as interesting:
My wife and I have now been using these brilliant little machines for over a week now. For more images and a full review of each of them stay tuned, I will post them soon. For now here is another shot of my lovely benchmark Inspiron machine from 2002 that I will use to compare to the two new baby laptops after the break, watch this space...
I have always found laptops fascinating. When I got my first proper PC back in 1999 for university I was fascinated by them too but they made a lot more sense to me, big modular boxes with lots of components, lots of room for them to breath, all hooked up to a huge monitor and a minimum of a mouse and a keyboard (wires everywhere). Laptops on the other hand have been almost as powerful as their large scale siblings, everything you need in one device and a battery so you can play with them anywhere you want. Magic!
The First
My first laptop was bought in 2005 when I moved to Amsterdam but unfortunately was anything but magical. It was my only computer at the time, I had the idea of 'travelling light' between England and the Netherlands but it ended up never actually coming with me on the plane because it was still too big and heavy. In my greed I bought a 17" desktop replacement with a very capable graphics card. I tried getting one from 'Rock Direct' and 'Mesh' who both guaranteed they would be able to make one up for me before I had to move out of the country but they are both a bunch of lying scum bags who just wanted my money, needless to say I will never deal either of them again! Actually I think Mesh are history now *grins with delight*, I wonder if it had anything to do with the way they were told to blatantly lie to their customers... hmm. Anyway the one I ended up getting at a shop in Amsterdam was just wrong for me. It was too big, hot and heavy for a start. It was also not very comfortable to use and had terrible battery life. It sent me flying back to desktop PCs so hard that I didn't think about laptops again until I moved back to England in 2009. I really wanted a 2nd computer, mostly for my wife, something either of us could use anywhere in the house. I wanted another laptop but i could not afford one, which is where this beast comes in to the story.
The Beast
This is a Dell Inspiron 8200. It was my brother's and dates back to 2002. He's since moved on to a newer Dell as well as a netbook for portability so he kindly donated the trusty old Inspiron to us. OK so its 44mm thick, weighs nearly 4Kg, lasts about 2 minutes on battery, has a big card sticking out the side for wi-fi (g) and a hard drive smaller than my micro SD card but I have to say... we love it! It's reliable, the CPU and RAM are ok enough to slowly run Photoshop on Windows XP Pro, the screen is a brilliant non-glossy 1440x900 and the keys are nice. I hope laptops of today last as well as this has, after nearly 10 years it's still providing us some productivity. In human years of evolution this thing is about 20 million years old!
Aspirations
As much as I love this old Dell I also love new shiny gadgets and their evolution so inevitably I have been looking to replace the Inspiron 8200 with something a bit smaller. Something that I could travel with, something that could last a decent amount of time on it's battery and yet have some power when needed. I thought this would be tough so I started looking at the best equipment money could buy. Here are some that I nearly bought but couldn't quite live with because they weren't perfect for their rather huge asking prices...
- HP Envy 14
- Sony Vaio S
- Samsung X3a
- Lenovo X1
- Macbook Air
- Sony Vaio Z
- Toshiba Portege 830
What's wrong with this high spec portables you ask? Well the first 2 suffer from very lacklustre screens. The HP used ot have a very nice one called a 'radiance' display but dropped it for some reason and turned a well rounded machine in to a heavy paper weight where almost any other laptop is preferable, very poor show HP! Sony 'S' series displays are plane bad, even if you upgrade them to the higher 1600x900 resolution. they are mind numbingly dull and even have bad viewing angles when they are not glossy, damn Sony I didn't know that was possible with LED but you managed it, another well rounded spec utterly destroyed by a terrible screen! What killed most of these machines for me was ultimately the price but on top of taking away a dedicated graphics card while not giving back much in the way of battery life (Samsung / Lenovo). The Macbook Air and Toshiba disappeared from my list for not including a backlit keyboard, something that Apple has since fixed but was inexcusable to lose in the first place. Sony Vaio Z is pretty perfect, I almost went for this but the price again stopped me. It's not that I don't think it's worth it, I think Sony have done a great job with the new Z, I love the idea of the external graphics as an option when backed up by the HD3000 of the Intel chip and the amazing job they have done with the size and weight... Simply stunning, I just couldn't afford it.
The Good Bit
I had made peace with the fact that I couldn't have the Sony for quite a while but I soon started looking in to Laptops again. This time for my father who wanted a similar specifications to me (thin, light, good battery life, powerful enough for a bit of photo editing) but on a much smaller budget to the one I had previously been looking at. My first thoughts were "you'll be lucky, I can't find what I want for twice the price" but I soon started to find things that were very interesting. Some of these deals are slightly older machines trying to get sold off and some are new ones fighting for attention in the ever growing 'thin & light' category. If you can live without the ability to play games you can pretty much name your budget and get something that covers all of the classic criteria. For a little over £300 you can get a thin 13" machine with an 8 hour battery life and a nice keyboard. Go up to £450 and things really start to become interesting! I found two machines at this level so good that I had to buy them both. Why did I buy two laptops when I couldn't afford one? Well firstly the one was a Sony Vaio Z which starts at over £1400. For this price I could get three very interesting laptops and have enough left over to buy a mouse or two. So now my wife and I both have a new laptop to use and carry around. Here are the details for the two bargains that I found...
- Alienware M11x - £450
An 11.6" LED / glass screen, fast hard drive, switchable dedicated graphics card (capable of playing almost any game), a backlit keyboard (configurable to any colour). 64bit full Windows 7 machine weighing 2Kg with up to8 hours of battery.
- Dell Adamo 13 - £450
A 13.3" edge to edge glass LED screen, 128GB SSD drive (boots in 30 seconds), solid aluminium chassis (behind the monitor as well), 18mm thick, ambient light sensor for screen and backlit keyboard. 64bit full Windows 7 machine weighing 1.75Kg with up to 5 hours of battery.
Both of these computers were a lot more expensive when they were new, The Adamo was £1500 and the M11x was £900. I thought that deals like this would be hard to find (unfortunately the Alienware deal has already ended) but there seem to be lots more where that came from, some full price machines almost as interesting:
- Lenovo X100e (£326)
- Asus UL30a (370)
- Acer Timeline X 3820TZ (£380)
- HP ProBook 4320s (£300)
- Lenovo Ideapad Z370 (£436)
My wife and I have now been using these brilliant little machines for over a week now. For more images and a full review of each of them stay tuned, I will post them soon. For now here is another shot of my lovely benchmark Inspiron machine from 2002 that I will use to compare to the two new baby laptops after the break, watch this space...
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