Not buying laptops

Buying other things !

I had to get petrol in the car ahead of doing a trip on Thursday (52.6mpg on the last fill up !) so off I toddle to the Mall. Ostensensibly, to do more research for laptop buying but mostly because I wanted to take advantage of light traffic, low pain levels and skin that's actually fairly intact today.

Yep. I'm going to buy a new laptop sooner or later. The one I have at the moment struggles a bit too much with playing HD quality video, which wouldn't be a problem if the on-demand video players gave the option to play in lower quality. So to avoid me having to hide behind the sofa (where the TV remote doesn't have the reach to allow advert skipping), I'm looking at replacing that laptop.

There's a few must haves with it :

Resolution of at least 900 lines. I like having lots of stuff on my screens and the normal 15.6" resolution of 1368x768 is too small. No point in having a laptop with the grunt to play HD video if it doesn't have the display to play HD video. Oh and it also puts more lines in the iTunes window.

Intel processor. AMD and Intel are still relatively similar in terms of performance but AMD do it by pushing the boundaries. Intel chips run cooler, so you can push them harder for longer. My house is quite warm right now which means the cpu in my desktop is running at 62 degrees C at full load with the fan turned down a little. My previous AMD powered machine would need the fan running at full speed (with noticeable noise) and would be 10 degrees hotter in colder conditions. I'd actually shut down the SETI BOINC stuff over the summer so it wouldn't cook.

And an Acer machine because we've had a long history with Acer laptops and they've done us well.

Oh and I don't want to spend a ridiculous amount of cash on it too. I don't need an ultrathin laptop and would probably knock one over and break it.

The other requirements are fairly loose :
15.6" at least, 17" preferred
Touchscreen
At least 6GB RAM
SSD hard disc (preferably as a second drive)
Windows 7 instead of 8
These are all optional to be honest, although 4GB is an absolute minimum.

To be honest, I think I'm going to give up looking for a little while. I reckon I've waited just a bit too long to get one of the remaining Windows 7 laptops. I'd be curious about getting a clean laptop and putting Ubuntu Linux on it but would need assurance that iTunes 10.7 (iTunes 11 is getting nowhere near my machines - spit) would run on it.

There's a new Intel chip (Haswell 4th generation) coming soon too, which is a) causing a lull in what's being sold and b) will shake up the market when it arrives.

So what did I buy apart from petrol ?

Sorry. Had to be done.

Oh and a few more bits and pieces showed up :
Tintin's original adventures on dvd (because the bluray is overpriced and has the soundtrack type which will drive me mental with silent blips)
Legend (Tom Cruise and Mia Sara adventure)
Jurassic Park trilogy

That should keep me amused for a while. If it weren't T20 season on telly :-) That's it for today.

Enjoy your evenings !