It is a happy time here in geekland as I welcome a new machine into the fold. I haven’t come up with a longterm name yet, tentatively he is simply referred to as codename darkhorse.
I hadn’t planned to get anything in the near future, but between the mule being ancient and almost dead, the quad desktop being six feet under, and the netbook, aka the burro, acting all kinds of wonky I was keeping my eyes open.
In the lower end price segment of the laptop market there is a lot of shit, but a toshiba caught my eye that was on sale for $499.99 which was $100 off the normal price and I just decided to pull the trigger as this machine had pretty much everything I was looking for.
Darkhorse’s specs are as follows:
Toshiba Satellite 15.6″ Laptop
Intel Core i3 2330m
dual core running at 2.20 ghz, with 3mb cache
6 gigs of ram, DDR3 1333mhz (I figured I might as well grab the full amount I reasonably see me needing now)
640gig hdd
5400rpm sadly, (but perhaps an ssd will take that spot down the road) which gives me oodles of space, considering my data resides mostly on externals these days
Intel HD Graphics 3000, run of the mill, but more than enough for what I am doing, ie no gaming
Webcam, which is pretty much standard these days
Integrated Wifi, also standard
3 usb ports, I have a hub so whatevs
HDMI output, for future shenanigans
Down the road I could have bought a pricier setup, I suppose, but it is nice to have a decent machine again. Themule simply couldn’t cut it anymore with its old school cpu and single gig of ram. It was just a cheapo 3.5 year old Compaq, which has taken a surprising amount of punishment, but it was time to grab something new especially considering the demise of the quadcore desktop that I loved so dearly. You take the amount of power for granted until you don’t have it any more.
Sure a Mac, or other highend lappy, would be nice, but I have to admit I got a fair amount of power on a small budget, which pleases the cheap, dutch bastard in me.
