Laptop brotherhood
Today is a dedicated clean-up day, in every sense of the word. My parents are visiting me in a couple days so I will be vacuuming, organizing, and scrubbing my entire apartment until it’s lifestyle-magazine clean. But I’ve also been cleaning out my bloated hard drives. While deleting a bunch of junk, I discovered this photo from last year which I had meant to post.
This is my trio of laptops, the oldest one from as far back as 2003. A lot of history and good times in this photo.
Left — 17″ Sager gaming notebook
This was my high school graduation present in summer 2003. I was preparing to start college and wanted a powerful laptop with a big screen that would be able to handle current-gen computer games. Hence, this desktop replacement laptop. Combined with the battery pack, it probably weighed 10 pounds. I took “desktop replacement” literally — this monster sat in my dorm room and rarely left. No big deal since I was an engineering major and didn’t need my laptop in class anyway.
If I could re-live my life, I might have requested an actual desktop computer instead. But there were occasions maybe once a month in which I did need the portability of a laptop. Tough call.
Middle — 14.1″ IBM Thinkpad T60
After 4 years with the Sager, it was literally a load off my back to switch to a “genuine” laptop. I bought this IBM laptop in 2007 for medical school use. I also got a desktop computer for my apartment that could take care of any heavy processing tasks, so all I needed in this cheap laptop was a screen big enough to be comfortably viewable after hours of Powerpoint lecture note-taking.
Right — 10.1″ ASUS EEE PC 1000HE netbook
This netbook was sort of an impulse buy in spring 2009. In several months, I was going to start clinical work in the hospital, and I thought having this small, ultraportable netbook would be much more convenient to carry around in the hospital than a 14.1″ laptop. Which was definitely true, but in actuality I use the in-hospital computers much more often, no matter how outdated and restrictive they may be.
Still, I’m glad I own this netbook as the size and functionality is perfect for the occasional lectures we have and especially for travel. This netbook saved my vacation to London and Paris last year. I was taking so many photos that I completely underestimated how much memory capacity I would need, but luckily I was able to tap into the 60 GB hard drive on my netbook.
In other news, I have decided to postpone my iPad review until my parents visit in a couple days. The only reason I bought an iPad is to gift it to my mom, so anything I write about it will be incomplete without getting her opinion about the device. The iPad is too limited for my needs and doesn’t fit into my lifestyle and computing habits, but I believe it’s pretty much perfect in every way for my mom. She has no idea I bought it. I’m quite excited to see what she thinks!
