You'd have to know the theme song to really get it...
You’ll understand the title in just a moment…
For the last few months my laptop has been in bad shape. Such bad shape I’ve been using a backup laptop. ((Trust me, the back up laptop is nothing to brag about.)) Something on my laptop’s motherboard went bad and killed the battery. ((You see, the motherboard – it went bad. It was one bad mother… Oh, forget it.)) ((The photo does not belong to me and is probably the property of MGM.)) I could still use it – but I had to keep it plugged in all the time. If I needed to move it, I had to shut it down all the way, move it, then boot it up – since it had no battery life at all.
Well, Dell’s kick ass incredible customer service took care of me – once again. I can’t thank these guys enough for going above and beyond. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, my next laptop is going to be a Dell. Thanks to Lionel my laptop is sporting a totally brand-spanking new motherboard and power cord. I’ve also just slapped in a totally new battery as well.
February has been a wacky month. And, on Friday February 13th the 400th user registered for this website. ((Photo courtesy of atxbill)) Since the 300th registered user, quite a lot has happened:
Besides being Friday the 13th, today has a very special meaning for the truly nerdy. Unix is a computer operating system developed back in 1969. For those of you who remember DOS, that kind of what it looked like. The up-and-coming operating system Linux is based on Unix. The Unix epoch, the time from which it starts to count “up”, was on January 1, 1970. On 2/13/2009 at 6:31:30PM ET the Unix epoch reached the time “1234567890“.
Dell’s customer service has been my single greatest customer service experience with any product, ever.
Let me break it down for you:
My computer, a Dell XPS m1210 was out of warranty. ((It died within 1 year after my warranty expired, but by the time I talked to Dell it was more than a year out of warranty.))
Here’s Lionel’s e-mail to me from just after midnight this morning:
“Jay:
That’s great news. I’m really glad to see it all worked out smoothly. I appreciate you being a loyal Dell customer. Feel free to tell any other Dell customers how to contact me directly if they need some assistance.
It’s customer’s like you that make this the best job I’ve ever had.
If you’ve got an issue with your Dell, get a hold of Lionel directly. He’s an incredible guy working for an incredible company. Lionel and Dell took care of me. This Dell XPS m1210 is my third Dell laptop, and my next computer will absolutely be a Dell too.
I’m undecided what kind of laptop I want/need. A netbook? A basic laptop? A high-end laptop? ((Photo courtesy of Ciccio Pizzettaro))
Figure out what you need, then figure out what you want
Needs
Its all about what you want and what you need. I need a laptop that will let me program, surf the web, listen to music, and send e-mail. This accounts for roughly 98% of my computer usage.
The last 2% of computer usage is comprised of processor intensive activities such as watching DVD’s, video games, video editing, DVD and CD burning, and manipulating large amounts of programming code. For instance, the WCAB legacy number to EAMS number converter involved more than 4.6 million lines of code. ((Seriously. 4.6 million.)) My previous laptop struggled with that one. I probably only do these things once every six months or so.
For what I need, a netbook would actually work very well for me.
Wants
As any computer user knows, its very frustrating to have a computer that will not do what you want or takes to long to do it. My wants are a super slim, light-weight, battery efficient, computer that has the processing power to deal with large amounts of data and the ability to burn DVD’s and CD’s.
A netbook fulfills the wants of a slim, light-weight, and battery efficient computer. A basic laptop would suffice for the processing power and CD/DVD burning capabilities.
Having it all
When it comes to laptops, sometimes you can have it all – it just depends how you’re going to compromise.
If money were no object, this would be a no-brainer: buy a high-end light and powerful laptop. These cost $1500 and start climbing steeply after that.
The other compromise is not so intuitive. A very decent external CD/DVD burner combo drive would probably only cost $75 or so. If I’m only burning discs 2% of the time, this is a very reasonable solution. The bigger problem is the underpowered processors in netbooks. They simply do not have the ability to play new games, handle large amounts of data, or deal with too many simultaneous tasks. The only possible work around here is where you use your underpowered laptop to remotely control a more powerful computer and use that more powerful computer to crunch numbers. ((Scroll down to the part about TightVNC.)) However, this won’t help with video games. ;)
Decision Time
What am I going to get? I’m going to run down the pro’s and con’s of netbooks, basic laptops, and high-end laptops next time. Stay tuned!
A little over a month ago my laptop died. I took it to a shop in Contra Costa County named, “Paramount Technologies” who were able to fix up my laptop in record time. ((Estimate: 3 days. Repair time: 3 hours. Now, that’s what I call service.)) Apparently, the problem was the video chip which had loosened from the motherboard over time (probably through overuse).
Friday evening my laptop died all over again. At least it was peaceful. I put my laptop to sleep and it didn’t wake up again.
