Got My New Laptop!

YEAH!!!!

My birthday present from Yankee Bill arrived yesterday, and this morning he set up the new wireless router. I am now portable, which means I can watch the kids outside and blog at the same time.

Ahhh, life is good.

I bought it from M-Tech, which I chose because they have very helpful customer service reps who can help you pick out a system that has the options you need but not a lot of other garbage. When I was first looking to pick a laptop out, the array of options were dizzying, as were the differences in price. I didn’t want to buy anything that had a whole bunch of capabilities that I didn’t need.

I liked the fact that the customer service reps at this company were not commission based, so the didn’t get anything from selling you a more expensive machine. I told the guy I talked to (Eric) that I wouldn’t be playing graphics intensive games, or watching DVDs on it, or anything like that. I just needed something that I could do my Internet surfing/blogging/word processing etc on. I also told him that I would be interested in having enough capability to use a graphics editor (like the freeware version GIMP that I found).

He asked me how much I wanted to spend-I said in the $600 dollar range. Then he gave me his recommendations and spent a long time explaining to me exactly why he recommended the machine, and how the various things (hard drive memory, RAM, Cache and other things I can’t remember) all interacted and how changing various options would effect the way the computer ran. He also recommended that if I could afford it that I bump up the memory and explained why, but assured me that the baseline model would work well-I would just “outgrow” it sooner.

When I asked about software, he said they recommend using open office, and even sell it already on a disk for $20, but that it was just as easy to download it yourself. They could have sold me the M. Office Suite, but it would have added a couple of hundred on to the computer-he said I’d probably rather spend the money on the hardware. He was right.

Now, I only opened the computer today, and it is all shiny and new with almost nothing loaded on it. So of course it works fast and is pretty. I can’t really comment on whether it really was a good choice until I’ve had it for a while. I do feel with some confidence that I didn’t buy a whole bunch of options that I really don’t need/won’t use. And it has some more capabilities than some of the cheaper more stripped down models I saw other places (DVD player, CD Burner, built in web cam, 3 USB ports, a 4 in one card reader to read camera cards etc etc).

Here is the computer that I purchased: Jenn’s New Computer (hmmm, looks like they aren’t selling it any more. Oh well, guess I got one of the last ones.) I did upgrade the hard-drive and so paid $720 total (with shipping etc).

I’ve downloaded my free OpenOffice suite, so I’m raring to go!