Laptop me

[zdashamber]

Alright, I need a new computer, a laptop. Because Oh, Dear, God, the slowness!

I don't think I'll get a Mac. Sorry, guys. I was willing to because they have better info on their site, and lighted keyboards, and they're under the radar of hackers, and it does kind of go with the hybrid/Californian lifestyle... But the Macs at work just suck so bad. I mean, my current home computer is from 1998, running Windows 98. It crashes maybe once a year, and it's never screwed me over. The OS 9 iMac I use at work, from 2000, crashes about twice a week, and for the past two or three weeks will no longer print things, to the bafflement of the Mac guy, who disses the OS and talks up OS X, but if I wanted to run Unix, which I might, I could do it just as well from a PC. And the OS X Macs? Also crash about twice a week.

I mean, the round mice. I'm not sure that I can trust Apple to put functionality before aesthetics, and I don't love the Mac aesthetic enough to deal with things like round mice. And also, I live and die by the Home and End keys. A life without them... I don't know if I could bear it.

And Apple's thing about not being Microsoft? It's a good thing, but then, what's up with subpoenaing ISPs to get info from people?

I am still open to being convinced otherwise. I've never seen a OS holy war, and I would be kind of tickled if one appeared in my comments here.

But the main point of this post is, where are good places to go to get comparisons of laptops? And what do you laptop-enabled folks think I should look out for?

I'm thinking that since what I can't stand is the current choked slowness of my computer, what I want is more than 512 Mb of RAM. I reckon I'd also want more than 5400 rpm on the hard drive, and more than 1.3 MHz in whatever that number measures.

As for memory, it seems that memory comes in small sushi-like packages these days, so I'm of the impression that I don't need to worry too much about how much there is. Likewise, I can get on fine with a 14-15" screen, and perhaps I'm a fool, but weight doesn't seem like too much of an issue, so long as it's less than 9 lbs.

On one hand, I don't have any desire to take the crack that is World of Warcraft. On the other, I might want to leave my options open. On the third, that would require I knew something about video cards, which knowledge I have been happy to avoid until now.

I want to be able to cruise and get onto wireless networks, but I have the impression that all laptops do that. Battery life: why shouldn't I do the thing I do with my digital camera: have two batteries, swap them when the first runs out? Thus a 3 hour battery life (kinda sucky, I gather) would become 6 hours before I had to find a wall, which oughtta take me most anywhere I'd go...

Eh. Where am I going wrong?

Comments

[whumpdotcom.livejournal.com]

In defense, I'll have to say that the hockey puck mouse is long gone; the keyboard I'm using has home and end; and well, OS 9 wasn't the most stable thing out there. We have a OS 9 production box that flakes bi-weekly (but that has as much to do with the old, non-threaded version of FileMaker running on it.)

Badger and Rook can give you unbiased reports on how often they crash or have to reboot.

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know the circlemouse has gone... But what I lie awake fearing is, what circlemice still exist, in less obvious forms? ;)

Anyway, on your laptop you have home and end keys? The work desktop Macs have them, but they don't recognize them except in Word.

[a2macgeek.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the hockey puck mouse hasn't been around for ages, and no one's ever said OS 9 was especially stable. On the other hand, my OS X laptop has gone for more than a month without rebooting/crashing/what have you. I think my record is 60 days. And not having to deal with viruses/malware/spyware is not to be lightly dismissed.

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

True. I'm going to have to learn about firewalls and bothersome things like that. It really was the main reason I was looking into Macs.

Learning

[aiyume.livejournal.com]

I'll be happy to help out with this. I'm enough of a geek that I like explaining technical stuff, and enough of a communicator to be able to do it effectively (I think and have heard).

Give me a call, we can do dinner and talk about it.

[tlatoani.livejournal.com]

Yeah, wow. It's so rare that my desktop OSX Mac crashes that I can't remember the last time it happened. It's way more than 60 days. An application might hang (usually the web browser) but you can just exit that app and restart it.

Immunity to virii is great, too.

And my Home and End keys work fine.

Admittedly, this is a desktop machine.

[druidsquirrel.livejournal.com]

If you're looking to minimize your number of crashes, you might consider getting a Linux laptop. Linux machines almost never crash. In fact, I had an uptime of over two years on my previous Linux laptop before hardware failure (the battery burned out) ended it. My current uptime is only about a month, but that's because my hard drive failed a month ago and had to be replaced. While it would be hyperbolic to assert that Linux never crashes, I believe it is fair to say that, given the reality of extrinsic factors that limit computer uptimes (e.g. power or hardware failures), you'll probably never be able to keep your machine running long enough to give the OS a chance to crash.

P.S. I've also never had a virus in 8 years of running Linux on all my home and work machines.