Here is my new toy; a Toshiba Qosmio luggable (as opposed to portable - it weighs 3.3kg). I don't intend carrying it too far, but it is a robust piece of equipment, and it needs to be seeing as I have two boys who will be using it from time to time.I decided against getting MS Vista in the end, and went instead for an end of line good quality machine loaded with XP as it seems Vista is causing problems with some games. I'm not keen on buying first versions of things as they usually have bugs that get resolved in the second version, and I'd rather hang on until a decent Vista upgrade is on the market.
I bought it from Darty with a laptop bag and MS Works thrown in, and forked out for the 2-yr guarantee extension for the same reason I did so with the television - boys. I have not regretted it with the tele as the on-off button died just before Christmas and got seen to and repaired quickly. I used to have a Toshiba Satellite portable the screen of which collapsed after two years, closely followed by the hard drive, and I have no intention of buying annual laptops.
When the screen was going kaput, I remember researching repairers of screens. As my ex-h and I were due to visit the UK, I looked up places in London. I don't know how I did it, but I found somewhere near the Temple in the City which was not a shop but some bureaucratic establishment dealing in Toshibas. I think we had lost the screen screws, or something, and I set up a meeting with London guys, handed over the laptop and picked it up later in the day, mended temporarily. They said it had basically had it, but they'd patched it as best they could, and charged us nothing! Amazing!
In fact, I still have the hard drive from that machine. I'm waiting for technology to get to the point where it can read corrupted hard drives like ours without it costing hundreds of euros. If I remember rightly, it has loads of photos of medical cases - irreplaceable ones, some of which had been backed up, but not all. Hard drives rarely tell you in advance when they are going to expire.
Anyway, my new joujou has a tele capability which means we could watch the tele on holiday I suppose, or avoid disputes as to who hogs the box as someone could watch the laptop in the comfort of another room.
One thing I sort of regret however, is that it doesn't have an in-built webcam and microphone. When I got back from Darty, I found my eldest, for the first time, logged into MSN chat on the pc with his girl friend from down the road, webcam and microphone going all hell for leather. I feel I might be using my Toshiba toy more than I expected!
