Laptop acquired
Finally something worth blogging about. I finally put the purchase of a laptop high on my list of priorities for this year. My only real criteria were a decent amount of RAM, and that it's not a Celeron-based machine. After strongly resisting the temptation of spending R11000 on a HP Pavillion with all the bells and whistles, and then drooling over a Lenovo N500 at R7500 I finally settled for a more modest Dell Vostro A860. It doesn't have the latest and greatest specs but it will be more than adequate: The processor is a Pentium Dual Core 2.0 GHz, and it has 2GB of RAM. The HDD is not the biggest (160GB) but it will more than suit my purposes and external drives are much better value for money anyhow (You can get 0.75 TB for under R1500). The graphics chipset is not particularly good (Intel X3100) but I don't care much about that. The laptop also comes with 802.11 a/b/g, 2 USB ports, Bluetooth, Ethernet 10/100, PC Card (not Express unfortunately) and SD/MMC card reader. Also, there's no web cam, but I have no desire for one at the moment. The build quality is pretty good in my opinion, as are the looks. I splashed out on a 3 yr extended warrantee, bringing the final price to just under R6500. I still need to get a carry bag/case and a Kensington lock, hopefully before the TPA meeting on Wednesday.