Laptop hype is intensifying ....

It almost happened tonight ....

I did another bit of laptop scouting as part of "I've burned my own dinner the last few nights, let's have someone else do that for me tonight" and headed off to the Mall again.

You can do internet shopping to check for prices but there is no substitute for getting your hands on stuff to see how they look and feel. And tonight, the result of the touch and scout were :

Acer - spongy trackpad. Incredibly unresponsive. I believe a tranquilized sloth would have been more responsive. This immediately drops them off the possibilities, spec will vary but keyboard, trackpad and often screen will be common across most of a company's laptops.

HP - didn't touch them this time. They have serious issues over quality and when I've looked before, their trackpads are better than Acer. As in, still very unresponsive. Sloth standard.

Dell - solid but uninspiring. Overall competent but the screen was dull. It's like my choice of cars ... if you can have Good or Excellent and Excellent is the same price, why do you settle for Good ? The Dell is Good.

Lenovo - one thing that the online reviews told me to look out for was screen quality and the Lenovo that I looked at had inconsistent bands of varying bright and dark across it. This is Not Good Enough and instantly confirms those online reviews.

This is a comment for the shop as well actually. If you put a laptop on display then customers will use it as an indication of quality of the product. If you permit a display piece to show obvious quality issues, then .... WHAT ARE YOU PLAYING AT !

MSI are too expensive.

The Asus laptop though ... had the best features of all of the above. Nice keyboard, responsive trackpad, excellent crisp looking screen. (The other laptops had blurring, this was sharp).

(Essential disclosure note - I ain't gonna be getting freebies from Asus any time soon).

You'll notice that I haven't said anything about spec yet ... Spec is a secondary consideration behind :
Quality - is it going to last, are bits going to HPfall off it, what is the user interface like.
PRICE ! Don't spend too much.
Size - I do like the littleness of my Macbook Air but I'm prepared to sacrifice that for more capability out of the laptop and in this case, it's more spec.

Ok - that's the S word out in the open ... Essential spec for me is :
Processor : i5 at least or AMD Ryzen. The AMD chip is only just starting to come to laptops though.
Memory : 8GB

More Megabites are good. Unless it's a certain Costa coffee place that gave me a shortlived tummy bug on Friday. Nuff said about that.
Storage : Either SSD or SSD + conventional drive. I'll need the space, so I'm looking at SSD + conventional as a minimum. Apparently the reviews don't like the Hybrid SSHD solution very much ... The speed and smoothness you get from having Windows on an SSD is unbeatable ... (This is because around the time of Vista, Windows became very broken on disc caching and they haven't fixed that yet)
And this one have good onboard graphics too. This wasn't part of my original spec but ... I've crept that a bit.

Yep. Nearly bought it tonight but I've held off. Maybe until the end of the week.

That speed thing is very important. People who are used to SSDs and are subjected to machines without them will know what I mean. I've reinstalled Battletech to my SSD and the difference is :

Conventional drive - go refill the coffee mug while it's loading. You'll have time.
SSD - update the iTunes tracklist, look back, it's done. (I don't update it much)

That's the advantage of an SSD. It does this by being a memory device ... and memory chips tend to be far faster at finding what you need than an archaic storage system that depends on magnetic chemical compounds deposited on spinning platters read by an arm that floats above the surface of the platters.

That's the curious thing about tech - if you explain the practical nature of things like hard discs, people would go : Why is it done like that ? That's NUTS ! But it works and it's simple to make so it's the cost effective option.

In other news ...

I restarted my Battletech campaign at the weekend and so far they're doing pretty well. I'm adopting the following strategy :
Pilots are going for Gunnery and Guts - they are very accurate with shooting the guns and they can take a lot of damage.
And this is a game that's all about soaking up damage while dishing it out.
Lower numbers of BIGGER guns - because there is a skill that ignores the damage reduction if you shoot things with only one weapon. And a big gun means the damage is on one area instead of many, which means more chance of penetrating the armour and hitting something soft and squishy.
Getting the morale up quickly when it's cheaper.
Doing more non-story missions to build up the characters and the money.

And ... enjoying less downtime between missions when it's loading stuff in ! Definitely enjoying it much more now that I'm not waiting for the game so much. I have joined the Meme Of Dekker though. He's one of the Mechwarrior pilots that you start with and he gets put in a very squishy mech. You have to be very careful or he gets :

The Meme of Maim. And the AI in this game is merciless, if they detect a weakness then they will focus down that weakness and murder it. In this case, Dekker, in the lightweight Spider ... with a headshot. It took 2 and a half months to repair that mech ...

Not tonight though. The Battlemechs are in the mech bay while I finish off the latest event on Idle Champions. Hopefully Catti-brie has it in her to complete this mission on her own. And without it taking too long !

Oh and the rumour that there is a Red Dot Projector in this laptop is .... just a myth.