My laptop just lost the “E” key and no replacement keyboard exists anywhere (and putting the “E” back is not doable.) My desktop computer has major problems with Firefox, locking up multiple times a day. Ditto for the laptop. Both computers are about three years old and have a creakily obsolescent 512MB of RAM and CPUs first made in the Pleistocene era.
On a hunch, I tried using Sue’s desktop, it’s a Core 2 Duo with 1GB of RAM. Firefox runs fine on it. No lockups. Plus everything else runs much snappier too. So the real problem was underpowered computers.
My new laptop, on order from HP, will be a
HP Pavilion dv6700t
Vista 64, 4GB ram
160 GB HD
15.4″ monitor
Core 2 Duo 2.0
Vista 64 can address 4GB of RAM, while regular Vista can’t. So, this computer will be able to handle anything for a couple of years to come, as 64-bit apps are just now starting to emerge.
Yes, I do want to get a Mac, someday. Was at a Mashable Monthly Meetup on Thursday in S.F. Met a personable guy at the door and we chatted. Turned out he was Pete Cashman, founder of Mashable. He said, hey Macs are great but I’ve been using Windows for years and I know how everything works. Yes, that does count for something. Quite a lot, actually. Plus, I have a few apps, crucial to me, that only run in Windows. Sure, I can get VMWare and run Windows off the Mac desktop, but this starts to get complicated.
So, no Mac this time, rather, a solid workhorse for a very reasonable price that’ll easily handle anything I’ll want to do, including video editing.
But Apple is sneaking up on me. I have an iPod and my next cell phone with be an iPhone. And maybe a Mac Mini is on the horizon too.
PS The Mashable Meetup was excellent. Lots of smart people with a zillion startups, everyone talking geek, wanting to know what you’re doing too, with none of the egos that inflate to fill the room that you sometimes see at other tech meets.
