Journey
For the longest time, I eshewed laptops. They were weaker. They couldn’t be upgraded. You had to swap out the drives. The list of things I didn’t like went on and on.
I’ve been forced to reassess, though. In another month, I move to Ukraine for two years. I wanted to have a computer there and a) couldn’t take my tower and monitor and b) didn’t want to shop for a computer there and risk a Cyrillic keyboard layout.
First, I decided what features were going to be important to me. I didn’t want a mammoth-sized system because I need portability. I would want to be able to at least consider some gaming, so it needed to be moderately capable in those regards. I did want to investigate into the new high def era optical media.
One interesting thing is I found very few builders that even had a next gen storage option at all. Thankfully, three companies had options with them. I started exploring the websites for Dell, HP and Sony. The cheapest Blu ray enabled Dell was well over two grand. Sony’s Blu ray started at $1500 and HP had an HD DVD burner I configured just a hair over $1900. Survivor-style, Dell was voted off the island. This left me with a home theater enthusiast battle between HD DVD and Blu ray.
I looked thoroughly at the pros and cons of both formats. Ultimately, Blu ray won because of it’s higher storage capacity. While movies will surely be watched on this laptop, I wanted the ability to archive media and back up internet music purchases. My entire music collection will fit on a dual layer BDR. That was the key decider.
With the base system, I began tossing around whether to get a preconfigured system or custom build. Sony’s FZ180 was very close to what I wanted. It had a solid 2ghz Core 2 Duo and 2 gigs of ram, two things I was committed to. When I tweaked the FZ190, though, I got what I wanted for a few dollars less plus a nice freebie: a Location Free Base Station. Depending on how well it works, that might enable me to see American television while I am overseas.
The system was ordered a week ago and should be in my possession in another week or so. I will write up a review at that time.
September 3rd, 2007 at 9:28 am
Interesting choice on the Sony/BRD… I actually have quite a lot of love for Sony laptops. I have a Sony VAIO VGN-T350P (the really small one) with DVD-R/W and it is perfect for travel. Before that I had a VAIO I used for like 5 years.
So, are you going to get Vista or XP on it? I’ve got Vista and it Is teh sux0r on my desktop. I think most of my problems are due to some legacy (pre-vista built) hardware, so a laptop built for Vista would probably be decent. As far as user experience, I prefer XP over Vista… it just feels slow and gooy compared to XP. I spend most of my time in OS X, so the difference in look-n-feel between Vista and other OS’s is pretty dramatic.