Once again, I’ve succumbed to my inner laptop-fanboy and ordered a new laptop. The previous one is now two years old and thoroughly out of date. Add to that its 3.7kg weight (on a good day) and its battery life which is somewhere between 1 and 1.5 hours (on that same good day), and it’s obvious that it’s time for a new one. Or so I rationalise, at least.
After months of searching and researching, I settled on the HP NC6000. See the ZDNet review and the Ars Technica review. It’s a goodie. Especially pay attention to the 5 hours and 42 minutes battery life under MobileMark 2002 productivity load (i.e. running Office, Mozilla, Virus scanner, Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Flash and doing stuff the whole time) and the more than luggable 2.3kg. To make it all that much sweeter, HP decided to equip it with an ATI Radeon Mobility 9600: that means I’ll be able to play around with those neato shader thingies.
I ordered the 1.6GHz Banias model with a gig of 333MHz DDR ram. Oh yes, I got the basic docking station as well. Whooohooo!
Related posts:
The only downside (as far as I can tell) is the limited 14.1″ 1024×768 screen resolution.
Well, my eyes can’t really manage much more than 1024×768 on a 14″ screen, and this time I didn’t want much larger than a 14″… so in this case, I don’t really find it a disadvantage.
At home the laptop will be connected to a 17″ CRT via the docking station. :)
How much did you pay for the whole package… if I may be so bold to ask?
Well, I went to HP/Compaq’s site yesterday and self-configured one of those NC6000′s “to the gills” so to speak. 1GB of memory, 8cell battery, 1.8Ghz processor, 64Mb video memory, etc. etc. And I was quickly able to jack the rice up $3000. Ouch… thats defintely in the IBM T41 range.
Things are priced differently here, especially when it comes to IBM Thinkpads. If I wanted to buy an IBM Thinkpad T41 with 1.6GHz Banias, 512MB RAM (half of what’s in my NC6000) and a Radeon 7500 (compare with the Radeon 9600 in the NC6000), it would cost me EUR 2346.96, EXCLUSIVE of 19.5% sales tax. That comes to EUR 2804.62 VAT included.
That’s why I’m not buying an IBM Thinkpad.
See here: http://www.icecat.biz/prf/index.cgi?product_id=61550;mi=start;smi=product;shopname=central;