Laptop recommendation
I’m going to do the unthinkable, and recommend a PC 
It’s a price range thing though - £400 just doesn’t buy a MacBook…
Anyway. Acer. We have a couple of them at work, so when Stephanie said she wanted a laptop I thought of them first. We have some VAIOs too, but honestly I find them nice looking but twitchy.
Funnily, she actually got a better model than the one that we ordered - it has a 15.4 inch 1280×800 screen. Very nice 
The spec on the site said 1024×768.
So what distinguishes them for me:
- They don’t offend me to look at. I know plenty of people don’t care how well their posessions are designed aesthetically (or sometimes functionally too it would appear), but I do. They look fine.
- They set themselves up pretty nicely - you don’t have to bugger around with drivers because the ones that came on it are generic and rubbish.
- They’re not stuffed to the gills with a load of bullshit (Sony, I’m looking at you) that you’ll just want to uninstall anyway. They’re not entirely innocent - there’s a so-called ‘Acer: Empowering Technology’ panel that likes to mither you from time to time. I’ll figure out how to disable that.
- They come with MS Works and Norton Antivirus, which is a good enough place to start.
- Slightly unusually, they’ve partitioned the hard drive into C and D. Keeps things a bit tidier.
Yessir, they get my chufty badge of approval
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October 30th, 2006 at 12:52 pm
Aye, my baby is an Acer and it came ‘above spec’, with a slightly faster pentium M than advertised.
What impressed me the most is that I have a reasonably entry-level machine, yet it runs 2003 server very smoothly. Not bad for a lappy. It does grind to a halt when I run Visual Studio 2005, but then one expects that with only 512mb RAM, which is getting upgraded to 2GB rather soon.
But my experience with it has been nothing but joy, if I ever got another, it’d certainly be an Acer.
October 30th, 2006 at 1:34 pm
Stepanie’s is an AMD Turion 64, which I suppose is comparable to a Core Duo(?) - it too has only 512Mb of RAM, but for web browsing, iTunes and Office it seems to be sufficient. Google Earth seems to be pushing the limits of its graphics horsepower, but its a nice enough little machine.
What is it with PCs and stickers though? All over the damn thing - I pulled all that bollocks off it.
I could happily work (well, code at least) on one.
I reckon I’ll buy a MacBook Pro new year 2008. Let them iron out the first-gen kinks in the Intel macs, OS X Leopard and Windows Vista first.