As the start of university approaches I have been wondering about a new laptop. I want a laptop to take to university so I don't have to lug my desktop PC along with me. However, I don't have an enormous amount of money to spend on a laptop so I decided to stick to a couple of key features, the main one being size - it must be small. This produces a problem as small laptops usually cost the most.
Given my monetary restrictions I decided that (unlike my usual requirement) I would forgo the need for hundreds of CPU cores, GBs of RAM, TBs of disk space and just settle for small. As such the natural solution to this would be to buy something like an Eee PC. However, I really don't want a Linux distro made for dummies. I want a real OS, and at the same time I don't want to spend time hacking the thing so I can get a terminal (not something you expect a Gentoo user to say)! Don't get me wrong, the Eee PC is a great product - it's just not for me.
So, my options are narrowing down dramatically!
Fortunately I was in town today - not something I do much nowadays, it's all internet buying for me. However, on this rare occasion that I did go in to town I happened to walk past the Carphone Warehouse and saw the Elonex Webbook. This little thing has a 10.2" screen, an 80 GB 2.5" HDD, 512MBs RAM, 1.6 GHz VIA C7M CPU, weights 1.3Kgs and was just what I was looking for. At a very reasonable price of about £240 or £25 per month with mobile broadband I could hardly say no.
Even though the specs are a little on the low side, I figured it's be just fine for compiling, writing and testing my (very small) OS - not to mention the mundane things such as writing university reports etc. So I decided I'd come home and check it out on the internet and then buy one online.
After reading some reviews I discovered that, if not the best on the market, it was the best price and the general performance and reviews were good. So, I headed off to the Carphone Wearhouse's website to buy my new 'Webbook'. However, when I got there I was shocked (er - well, perhaps that is a slight exaggeration, disappointed, I was disappointed) to find out that online it only comes with Windows XP, and as such costs more - bah! Like I'm going to get that then.
So I'm back off into town tomorrow (two days in a row!?!) to buy the version with Ubuntu on, cheaper and I get it straight away with no £15 delivery charge. I'm not sure what the moral of this story is. Some might think it's 'impulse buy'... in fact, yeah, that's what I think :p
So the only question that remains is should I spend the extra £360 over 24 months and get the mobile broadband, or should I just buy the laptop and forget the broadband - hmmm... decisions, decisions.
