New Laptops
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Mrs. Flynn and I bought a pair of laptops last night. The Acer Aspire 5570Z[^]. Wal-Mart had just put them out on the shelf this week (it's not even listed on their site yet). It has a 14" screen at 1280 x 800, Windows Vista Home Premium, 1 gb ram, 120 gb hard drive, and not a whole lot of crud on the drive. The price was nice -- only $548 (US) per laptop. Saved enough on the cost of the laptops over what we were planning to spend to pick up an upgrade copy of Vista Ultimate (for my laptop). Spent most of last night creating the restore discs, downloading the Windows XP drivers and installing XP on Mrs. Flynn's laptop (since she doesn't want to run Vista yet). I'm going to run XP on mine as well until we can upgrade the laptops to 2 gb ram, then I'll likely install Vista Ultimate. Anyway, we're just excited to have a couple of new toys to play with. :cool: Flynn
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Mrs. Flynn and I bought a pair of laptops last night. The Acer Aspire 5570Z[^]. Wal-Mart had just put them out on the shelf this week (it's not even listed on their site yet). It has a 14" screen at 1280 x 800, Windows Vista Home Premium, 1 gb ram, 120 gb hard drive, and not a whole lot of crud on the drive. The price was nice -- only $548 (US) per laptop. Saved enough on the cost of the laptops over what we were planning to spend to pick up an upgrade copy of Vista Ultimate (for my laptop). Spent most of last night creating the restore discs, downloading the Windows XP drivers and installing XP on Mrs. Flynn's laptop (since she doesn't want to run Vista yet). I'm going to run XP on mine as well until we can upgrade the laptops to 2 gb ram, then I'll likely install Vista Ultimate. Anyway, we're just excited to have a couple of new toys to play with. :cool: Flynn
Wow that does sound cheap. I had a quick google and prices were even as high as $1000+
Ant. I'm hard, yet soft.
I'm coloured, yet clear.
I'm fruity and sweet.
I'm jelly, what am I? Muse on it further, I shall return! - David Walliams (Little Britain) -
Wow that does sound cheap. I had a quick google and prices were even as high as $1000+
Ant. I'm hard, yet soft.
I'm coloured, yet clear.
I'm fruity and sweet.
I'm jelly, what am I? Muse on it further, I shall return! - David Walliams (Little Britain)No kidding. I did a pretty good Scooby Doo impersonation when I saw the price. :-> There was a 15.4" screen model for $698, but it was actually a small step backward for the price, since it had a slightly slower processor and no memory card reader. I almost got the larger laptop for myself, but then decided to get the cheaper laptop and Ultimate instead. Glad I did, since I can now make one image for both laptops and not worry about hardware differences. Flynn
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Mrs. Flynn and I bought a pair of laptops last night. The Acer Aspire 5570Z[^]. Wal-Mart had just put them out on the shelf this week (it's not even listed on their site yet). It has a 14" screen at 1280 x 800, Windows Vista Home Premium, 1 gb ram, 120 gb hard drive, and not a whole lot of crud on the drive. The price was nice -- only $548 (US) per laptop. Saved enough on the cost of the laptops over what we were planning to spend to pick up an upgrade copy of Vista Ultimate (for my laptop). Spent most of last night creating the restore discs, downloading the Windows XP drivers and installing XP on Mrs. Flynn's laptop (since she doesn't want to run Vista yet). I'm going to run XP on mine as well until we can upgrade the laptops to 2 gb ram, then I'll likely install Vista Ultimate. Anyway, we're just excited to have a couple of new toys to play with. :cool: Flynn
A few months ago I got an 5610 (15" 1280x800) with a c1d1.73 and 1gb ram for an effective $680 after tax, rebates, and free printer. It runs vista premium just fine.
-- You have to explain to them [VB coders] what you mean by "typed". their first response is likely to be something like, "Of course my code is typed. Do you think i magically project it onto the screen with the power of my mind?" --- John Simmons / outlaw programmer
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A few months ago I got an 5610 (15" 1280x800) with a c1d1.73 and 1gb ram for an effective $680 after tax, rebates, and free printer. It runs vista premium just fine.
-- You have to explain to them [VB coders] what you mean by "typed". their first response is likely to be something like, "Of course my code is typed. Do you think i magically project it onto the screen with the power of my mind?" --- John Simmons / outlaw programmer
These do, too. I just prefer 2 gb for Vista. Especially when working with Visual Studio. :) Flynn
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Mrs. Flynn and I bought a pair of laptops last night. The Acer Aspire 5570Z[^]. Wal-Mart had just put them out on the shelf this week (it's not even listed on their site yet). It has a 14" screen at 1280 x 800, Windows Vista Home Premium, 1 gb ram, 120 gb hard drive, and not a whole lot of crud on the drive. The price was nice -- only $548 (US) per laptop. Saved enough on the cost of the laptops over what we were planning to spend to pick up an upgrade copy of Vista Ultimate (for my laptop). Spent most of last night creating the restore discs, downloading the Windows XP drivers and installing XP on Mrs. Flynn's laptop (since she doesn't want to run Vista yet). I'm going to run XP on mine as well until we can upgrade the laptops to 2 gb ram, then I'll likely install Vista Ultimate. Anyway, we're just excited to have a couple of new toys to play with. :cool: Flynn
Beth and I have a pair of Acer Travelmate 8215WLMi laptops (2GHz mobile Core2Duo, 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD, 15.4" 1680x1050 display) which are proving to be more than capable of handling everything we throw at them. My only quibbles are the preinstalled stuff (some of it was nasty) and the fact that mine cost £400 more than Beth's (it was bought 6 months earlier). Performance is great, but Outlook 2007 still manages to bring the system to a crawl by thrashing the disk. I've never seen the CPU max out though - the bottleneck on these machines is definitely the hard disk. 200GB solid state drives, anyone? :-> The display seemed huge when it first arrived, but now I'm rather too used to it to find it spacious. Mind you, the fact that I also regularly use a 24" TFT probably doesn't help...:doh:
Anna :rose: Linting the day away :cool: Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "If mushy peas are the food of the devil, the stotty cake is the frisbee of God"
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Beth and I have a pair of Acer Travelmate 8215WLMi laptops (2GHz mobile Core2Duo, 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD, 15.4" 1680x1050 display) which are proving to be more than capable of handling everything we throw at them. My only quibbles are the preinstalled stuff (some of it was nasty) and the fact that mine cost £400 more than Beth's (it was bought 6 months earlier). Performance is great, but Outlook 2007 still manages to bring the system to a crawl by thrashing the disk. I've never seen the CPU max out though - the bottleneck on these machines is definitely the hard disk. 200GB solid state drives, anyone? :-> The display seemed huge when it first arrived, but now I'm rather too used to it to find it spacious. Mind you, the fact that I also regularly use a 24" TFT probably doesn't help...:doh:
Anna :rose: Linting the day away :cool: Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "If mushy peas are the food of the devil, the stotty cake is the frisbee of God"
Mrs. Flynn has a 17" LCD on her desktop, and I have a 19" LCD. These are 14" widescreen at 1280x800, so a little small on the text, but I've already adjusted to it. We're looking to upgrade these to 2 gb to match our desktop configurations, and so I can run Visual Studio without too many problems. I also bought the Vista Ultimate upgrade, so I may run that after updating the memory. To solve the cruft problem on the installations, I made a set of recovery discs, then created a Windows XP image with one laptop, using the untouched laptop to get information on the drivers (all of which were on the ACER site). The only problem I ran into was installing the image on to the second laptop. Got an error about a missing Autocheck.exe file. After Googling the error, I found the problem -- the partition was set as hidden for whatever reason. Fortunately, I had a bootable Partition Magic disc. I had to boot into that and use a utility called ptedit to reset the partition type, then go into the recovery console and run fixboot and fixmbr. Yeesh! :doh: At least that works and we now have an image that we can share between the two laptops. We're planning to do the same thing with Vista Home Premium in the near future so we can update when we're ready to. Flynn