New Toy

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Check out the new toy: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6834115446

We've really liked the last couple Acer laptops.

[Ddrak]

Nice - 250G HDD? That's huge in a laptop!

How's the Intel video?

Dd

[Harlowe]

I think that's what my guy is getting with part of his tax return.

[Freecare Spiritwise]

You can get em with 320 gig drives now Ddrak. There's even 120 gig 7200 RPM laptop drives too, but they take much more power.

It should arrive Thursday, so I'll know how good the video is then. I'm hoping it will play TF2, but I got this one for work and tried to hit the sweet spot on price / features. I used to buy top of the line laptops, but they go obsolete so quick, and usually crap out in a year or so anyway.

And yeah, this one's from my tax return too.

[Ddrak]

There's even 120 gig 7200 RPM laptop drives too

Actually, I have a 200 gig 7200 RPM in my laptop atm.

Dd

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Actually, I have a 200 gig 7200 RPM in my laptop atm.

Nice. I didn't know they went up that high. Is it a battery hog? The slower hard drives are the main reason that laptops aren't as fast as desktops. I use mine for work less than a month per year so it's not a huge deal for me...

The real test will be trying to blow vista home premium off and install XP, as some of my dev tools don't work right under vista. I will probably try to make it dual boot vista ultimate though, which was the reason I went for a bigger drive.

Another reason I went with the Acer as opposed to say, a Gateway, was that I went to their support site and saw that they provide all the drivers for XP for my model. All the laptops that came with XP pre-installed were a total ripoff. It's stupid to charge a premium for an older OS. I'll take my chances with installing it myself.

[Ddrak]

Doesn't seem any more of a hog than other 7200rpm drives - definitely uses more power than the slower drives though. Running a Dell Latitude D820 with WUXGA, so I have plenty of battery hogging going on regardless. I get about 3-4 hrs on a 90Wh battery if I'm doing nothing at all on the machine. If I actually try to use it then that number drops pretty sharply.

Drive Link (I got it on special for $180)

Dd

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Sweet little machine. It seemed a waste to blow out a perfectly installed OS, so I took a friend's advice and installed MS Virtual PC 2007 on it, and installed XP pro as a virtual machine. Now it's the best of both worlds!