It's time to upgrade my laptop. Maybe upgrade is too gentle, it sounds like I've been using a laptop and it's got shortcomings. It's time to get a laptop. The one I have is so old it doesn't count as even owning a laptop anymore. It's a Compaq Presario 1255, circa 1999. If the battery worked (at all, even for a minute), then I might consider it something that I could use to make my office mobile. But a 333MHz Windows 98 computer doesn't stand to do much for me today but build muscle as I lug it from place to place.
I don't want to be branded a Compaq lover, but I've been considering (with my one long day of research) the Compaq V2000 or Compaq R3000. I don't know how they stack up to the competition, just that Best Buy had the V2000 and it looked nice, Staples had the R3000 and it was reasonably close to my budget. I think. It's pretty difficult to make an objective decision when there are so many competitors out there.
Step 1: Determine Requirements
Today, the ideal mobile computer would have a 17 inch wide screen and be no larger than a pocket dictionary. Of course, I'd like it to be snappy since I do some coding and one day would like to experiment some more with pixel shaders. That means it should have a high end processor, maybe an Athlon 64 or a 32-bit Athlon 3000XP. Half a gigabyte of RAM at least, and a Radeon 9000 or equivalent Nvidia graphics chip. I'm not willing to compromise on battery life, mind you. Old laptops posted battery run times of 3 hours, so Moore's law says that now, a couple years later, I should easily be able to get 6 hours of untethered computing, right? And I won't pay more than $1000.
So I'm looking for something the size of a PDA in my pocket but a big screen TV when I use it. What did they call that on Dr. Who? Dimensionally transcendental? Dr. Who, with the Tardis, you remember, right? Nevermind...
I suppose something has to give, I have to choose a point in the battery life vs computing power continuum and the size vs, um, size range. Computing power is more important than being away from AC for me, but not drastically so. I'll be happy with something beween an Athlon 2200XP and a low end Athlon 64 (or the Intel equivalent, I'm not partial). I'd prefer a decent graphics chip, but won't pay a lot more just for that. It also seems that it's not hard to find 512MB memory in a laptop these days. The one problem I have in the power battle area is that all the hard drives seem to run at a sluggish 4200RPM. Meanwhile 7200RPM has become standard on desktops (at least for those of us stuck with ATA/IDE drives). Why don't hard drive spindle speeds throttle like CPU clocks? I'd expect it would be a lot simpler than the CPU throttling. I'd rather the faster hard drive and no CD or DVD writer. I imagine that must be a big power leech. I mean, it uses friggin' lasers. As for the size issue, I thought about both extremes, but I know that I can't stare at a tiny screen for long. If I write any substantial amount of code or spend much time actually using the computer, then I've got to have a legible font size. I've got two 19" monitors on my desktop - it would be absolutely painful to go to anything under a 15" display. I like the wide aspect ratio of the bigger laptop screens - it makes for longer lines of text when you're coding. That's what led me from the lovely little Avertec over to the big honkin' Compaqs.
So you see, it's not that I'm a big fan of Compaq, it's just that they're right there on the shelf...