Choosing a laptop – what do you look for?

This came up in a discussion I had with my wife, so I thought I would share it here as well. Most people, when buying a laptop, see stuff like processor, memory etc. Now, the difference between a similar specced Intel or AMD may be marginal, but I won’t even go into that.
When buying a laptop I prefer to concentrate on some other points:

1. Casing: Preferably magnesium alloy body.
2. Hinges: Metal would be best, but there are very few laptops with this. When looking, make sure the hinges won’t become loose in time.
3. Locking: A clasp is better, if the laptop opens up in your bag then you will have a very heated laptop!
4. Fan and vents: Make sure these are on the side, if the fan/air intake is at the bottom of the laptop then whenever you keep the laptop on a mattress/sheet, there is a risk of small fibres entering the laptop and clogging the fan.
5. Hard disk speed: In a laptop, this will affect performance quite a bit – most laptops come with slower hard disks to save on battery life.
6. Some of the newer laptops come with motion detection to quickly park the hard disk if it moves suddenly – this is a rather good feature.
7. Try to get a laptop with a dedicated graphics card, integrated cards suck at games. Also, if you use Linux – avoid ATI!

That’s not to say processor speed etc. isn’t important, but it certainly isn’t the only thing that you should be looking at. If you think of any more points, leave a comment

The great Dvorak experiment

… is dead. I got to a stage where I could type with a fair amount of accuracy, but my speed sucked and I couldn’t get a proper Dvorak keyboard here at work. Typing on little bits of paper stuck to the keyboard is not comfortable!

Hello, World!

Seems apt to have “Hello, World!” as the title to the first post – as I mentioned in my profile, I’m a software engineer who has realized he needs to keep studying something new everyday. So this blog will follow me around in my forays around assorted computer related topics – and will serve as a tool to jog my memory about what I read.