Well, we are enjoying our time in Houston. Even with the record
breaking snow fall on Friday.
But we have been very busy. As usual, we had a several page shopping
list. Things that are usually not available, but sometimes just too
expensive outside the US. Yes, some things are cheaper in the US. For
example, computers, and Dave's 5.8 year old Dells needed replacing. He
loved Dells for many years, but he had so many identical hardware
failures on his 2 identical Precision M60s that he was looking forward
to some new and reliable computers.
The M60s were very high end computers and only very recently eclipsed
in hardware capability, but they had lots of parts fail, motherboards,
screens, video cards, etc, and Dave was very glad that he had the
"International Fix Anything that Breaks" warranty, but it expired in
Jan 2009 and several high dollar items failed after. Even though his
credit card added a year of warranty, it is a major hassle to get the
parts sent to Turkey. One of the downsides of travel.
But, the new Dell computers that Dave was interested in had IT experts
that buy 50 or 100 computers for big companies writing in the feedback
columns that they were seeing high failures, unlike the dependable
Inspiron models they had been buying for years.
Dave took this to mean that Dell cannot be trusted until they have
several years of "good grades." So, now he had to look at all of the
countless laptops out there today. Ugh! What a long job.
Well, he recently chose an ASUS UL50Vt that says that it has 12 hr
battery life due many ingenious power saving tricks. Since the battery
has less capacity than his M60s, we hope that this means that when we
are sailing it will use much, much less electricity. It also has a
cool feature that it recognizes Dave when he sits down in front of it.
It logs him in without him having to touch the computer or enter
passwords. Tre Cool!
The bad news so far is that ASUS included a lot of perhaps interesting
software, but has nearly NO documentation, so it is a guessing game as
to how these things work or even what they are for. Grrrrrrr! Dell was
prolific with excellent documentation and Dave has high documentation
standards as a result.
Time will tell how the old software will work on Window 7 Pro 64 bit
computers, But the new computers cost so much less than any one of the
last 4 computers that he has had, so he could spend a little on
software and still be way ahead. The UL50Vt seems to be a good to very
good laptop with an outstanding battery life and super low power
consumption. (Time will tell if that claim is correct.)
His other new computer is a Hewlett Packard dv6t Quad. That means that
in a manner of speaking that it has 4 CPUs or 'brains' and allows
'hyperthreading' so that it can do several things at once, IF the
software is smart enough to figure that out. It was on sale the day
Dave bought it and even though he'd already decided what he wanted, it
was a pleasant surprise to get over $400 off and several free upgrades
to features that Dave would not have gotten, but when they are free,
why not.
Tip: Once you have narrowed the choices to a few models, do a Goggle on
dv6t rebate
But use your computer name instead of dv6t. There was a $200 off
coupon, just for the asking. He found it totally by accident, but what
a nice surprise!
Dave is somewhat dubious about that 4 things at once stuff, but thinks
that it is a nearly state of the art computer that will be able to do
anything that he needs for the next several years and hold it's value
well. But, when anyone can get a laptop for under $300 that is
probably fine for the main uses, perhaps in 3 years we will switch to
low end computers. The jury is out on that one.
Sorry to drag on about this. Can you tell that Dave wrote it??? Happy Holidays.
