Better than a '58 Plymouth Fury
A new laptop!
Well, not a new one, but new to me. Spotted in a secondhand shop on Tottenham Court Rd, it's one of those fire-breathing gaz-guzzlers from the early Noughties: built like a Mack truck, heavy as a brick-filled skip and heats up like an industrial furnace. I just had to have it - for the same reason, perhaps, that middle-aged men in their Hondas fantasise about gullwinged and finned V8s from the 60s.
I think laptops turned a corner in 2003: as useful performance plateau'd (there's only so much chip you need for Word) physical size started becoming an issue. Today's laptop is a Honda: sleek, slim, sensible... and devoid of personality.
Both my laptops are over three years old - yet the screen res, the max RAM, even the processor are bigger and faster than today's slimmed-down, low-fat, healthy-eating milquetoast carryalongs. There still aren't many laptops that can do full UXGA rezz - looking along shelf after shelf it seems WXGA is today's high watermark - yet both these crates handle 1600x1200 with ease. And few modern dualcores are clocked at over 3GHz; with today's mantra of low weight and high battery life, three gig processors just aren't politically correct. Yet the new box steams point oh six past the three billion cycles.
About the only thing these laptops lack is a decent hard drive... 40 and 60GB, not enough for desktop replacement. But I'll take that as the uncomfortable equivalent of bucket seats. And as I start pimping my new ride with the go-faster stripes and tailfins of new software licenses, I feel somehow seventeen again.
Well, not a new one, but new to me. Spotted in a secondhand shop on Tottenham Court Rd, it's one of those fire-breathing gaz-guzzlers from the early Noughties: built like a Mack truck, heavy as a brick-filled skip and heats up like an industrial furnace. I just had to have it - for the same reason, perhaps, that middle-aged men in their Hondas fantasise about gullwinged and finned V8s from the 60s.
I think laptops turned a corner in 2003: as useful performance plateau'd (there's only so much chip you need for Word) physical size started becoming an issue. Today's laptop is a Honda: sleek, slim, sensible... and devoid of personality.
Both my laptops are over three years old - yet the screen res, the max RAM, even the processor are bigger and faster than today's slimmed-down, low-fat, healthy-eating milquetoast carryalongs. There still aren't many laptops that can do full UXGA rezz - looking along shelf after shelf it seems WXGA is today's high watermark - yet both these crates handle 1600x1200 with ease. And few modern dualcores are clocked at over 3GHz; with today's mantra of low weight and high battery life, three gig processors just aren't politically correct. Yet the new box steams point oh six past the three billion cycles.
About the only thing these laptops lack is a decent hard drive... 40 and 60GB, not enough for desktop replacement. But I'll take that as the uncomfortable equivalent of bucket seats. And as I start pimping my new ride with the go-faster stripes and tailfins of new software licenses, I feel somehow seventeen again.
posted by chrisworth at 8:57 AM
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