Carl Tyler's Blog

My current laptop is coming up for it's 4th birthday, which in the equivalent of dog years for a laptop means it's about 100 years old, half the keys have no letters as they have worn off, and I think there is probably a complete  biscuit under the keyboard if you glued all the crumbs together. . I have been coming up with my requiremnts and this is what I have so far:

• Cannot have a touchpad, I hate them and my chubby hands always catch them and I end up typing somewhere different to I expected, so the little IBM nipple is my preferred option.
• Removable hard drives
• >=1Gb Memory
• Firewire/USB2 ports
• Active TFT screen, I am happy with 1024x768 as I find the ones that do 1600xwhatever just too tiny to read comfortably.
• Built in wireless, if a built ethernet port too even better.
• Weight doesn't really matter too much, but less than 10lbs would be nice, I suffered my Compaq luggable for long enough, was a great demo machine though.
• DVD player, preferably DVDRW, at minimum CDRW.
• Must have the light on the screen for being able to read the keyboard
• >=1 PCMCIA slot
• Extra software I don't care about, as I tend to format a new machine as soon as I get it.

I had a Dell portable once and really disliked it, I am leaning towards IBM again, as I have had a Thinkpad for about the last 10 years and have had great luck apart from the time I dropped it about 4 feet onto a concrete floor.  Getting a Thinkpad also has it's benefits as I have about 5 Thinkpad power adapters, which means pretty much where ever I sit in the house I am near a plugged in adapter.