the dobres III
Posting has been light of late as I transitioned from my two year-old Sony Vaio laptop to a new Vaio desktop PC. I was more than prepared to be An Adult and save up for it myself. Assuming my math held up, I would have had enough money for the new system by Christmas, or as my people call it, The Holiday Season. That plan got rerouted when I accidentally took pride in my financial situation in front of my parents. They mentioned that my future brother-in-law needs a good laptop for his business, and they’d be willing to buy me a new desktop if I gave him my old laptop. I felt a bit thwarted, but who looks a gift computer in the mouth?
Now, with all traces of my shameful life erased from the old system and transferred to the new, I have a little time to reflect on the transition. This is the first desktop computer I have ever owned by myself. Prior to this, I have had three different laptops, the first being a Gateway (I was young and stupid), and the rest Sony. I can’t say enough good things about Sony laptops. It is a testament to Sony’s quality that my younger brother still uses the laptop I purchased four years ago, which aside from the permanently dead battery, runs as well as it ever did. This is the kind of performance that inspires psychotic brand loyalty. Still, the laptop experience had worn on me of late. Small screens, low resolution, tiny keyboards, and no realistic possibility of hardware upgrades. The time has come to move up to something bigger, and God, does this thing deliver.
It’s not the processor speed or the RAM. In fact, I’m surprised at how little the CPU speeds have increased as compared with two years ago. Is Moore’s Law finally faltering? Typically each new laptop was at least twice as fast (in raw numbers, at least) than the last. Not so here, with only a slight increase in raw computing power. The greater RAM capacity is a bonus, but nothing earth shattering. The real difference for me is in the huge hard drive (see “shameful life,” above) and the excellent Sony monitor. A rung higher on the resolution ladder than anything I’ve used over the past four years, at least three times as bright, and twice as crisp, the new monitor has absolutely redefined my digital life. Picture the difference between a black and white television and color, and you’ll get some idea of just how much of an improvement this is for me.
Yes, this is the website of a true computer dork. Tada.
Coincidentally, we’ve flipped. I purchased an iBook today to replace my 3-year-old iMac, as the iMac has started to iCrap out on me. Blows the iMac away without even being a G5, though my first thought upon turning it on was, “I’m going to have to make a proper color profile for this screen.”