Back to School

September 15th, 2008 :

The good wife inherited the Presario V5201CA laptop when I bought the Presario CQ50-108CA this weekend, two years later the latter machine offers easily twice as much of everything at less money ($499 Best Buy) and of course the "interesting" Vista Home Premium SP1 which basically gave me three hours of fun and setup before I even had the chance to surf the web. I'll be checking out the low end, but good for a laptop, Nvidia 8200m Geforce GPU in the next week when I install Warcraft again (after my three months off) although almost 20 gigaflops means very little to me. I looked at the 17" laptops but they're just straight out too big for me.

I did mention I was back playing Warcraft didn't I?

Dell have stepped through the $500 barrier also, in fact they sent me a limited time/quantity deal the other week for the lowest end 1525 at the $399 level, of course, back to school being as mad as it is, they were sold immediately even with that sad configuration.

I think the market is getting more diverse, the range of available CPUs, GPUs and even O/Ss now is getting dizzy, even the likes of Toms Hardware website is confusing. The low end laptop market, with the mixing and matching of dual cores and several video options is fundamentally insane, plus now the 9" Atom offerings are hitting bigtime - will we see a sub $200 one of those soon? - suffice to say, quad core mobile cpus and new generation offerings will surface in the next year or so and we'll see what I buy in September 2010.

Postnote. Atom machine spotted in Future Shop at $249 on the 28th September, 2009 and a slightly better version of my laptop available at $459