Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Did I mention my new laptop?

I don't know why I haven't blogged about this before but just after Christmas I splurged on myself and went and bought a new laptop. My Toshiba netbook has been a trusted friend over the last four years. I had been getting on very well with Ubuntu 12.01 as an operating system however there were some fundamental issues that were becoming increasingly difficult to live with:
  • a small screen, not good for image editing (which I do a fair amount of)
  • related to above, the dialogue boxes always needed to be maximised for me to see the Save or Cancel buttons
  • sound output through the speaker was in mono and not very loud
  • performance in general was poor, although it only had a 1GB of RAM, just not enough to cope with video without a lot of lag and HD video was just a no no
So for the reasons above I decided to buy a new laptop. I shopped around a bit and considered different options but in the end I wanted something that was probably unremarkable but affordable. I chose the HP Pavilion 15, coming with a 1 TB hard drive, 8GB of RAM and a Intel i5 processor. Good sound and a big screen. The screen is very slim indeed, I worry about breaking it. The laptop isn't a lightweight one but my work laptop is a similar screen size but much heavier. In general, I'm happy with my new laptop but getting used to Windows 8.1 has been, and still is, a bit taxing sometimes. I went for a non-touchscreen version. I've learned all of the trackpad gestures and it works very well. Don't really need a touchscreen

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Good for you for getting a new laptop. I also had a smaller screen laptop, which I'm having issues with because very little fits on the screen. I can't even play the latest games with such small screen resolution. So I bought a new one, even though technically, I can survive with the old one. Haha! I hope you've adjusted well with the new Windows OS! :D

Gene Sullivan @ ETech STL

Unknown said...
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