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Monday, October 4, 2010

Bought a laptop finally

In my earlier post, I was asking whether I should buy a new netbook. I only needed it to do little things. I did not need the fastest laptop either. I needed something cheap, something that can be carried around (especially when I visit Sri Lanka in December) and something that would run off the battery for a reasonable time, 5 hours+ sounds reasonable.

So I searched around and finally settled for the Asus UL20A. It is not very fast,. Actually it is not fast at all. I can really feel it after using my desktop with an SSD, 8GB RAM and a quad core running at a respectable 3.6GHz. But I suppose it would be same with almost all the laptops out there that don’t carry an SSD and 4GB or more RAM. This has 2GB RAM, a Dual Core ultra low power Celeron @1.2GHz and a Seagate 320GB HDD.

Anyways, enough mourning over the lack of speed. I knew what I would be getting myself into. I told you I didn’t need speed anyways. Portability is what I needed the most. In that regard, this size is very good. 12”. It is small enough to be easily portable and large enough to type easily. I am not finding any problem typing with this keyboard. Sure it is not a G15, but it is pretty good.

This doesn’t have an optical drive. So I don’t know how to restore the OS if something bad happens. There is a restore partition however. I got the restore disks as well, I wonder for what purpose, because this doesn’t have an optical drive. I bet there is a way to restore the OS without the disks, using the restore partition. I didn’t look into this. I don’t think there is a need for that kind of thing ever because I will not be install all the crap that I come across in this laptop. Remember, there is only a little this laptop can do anyways.

I got the lappy in the evening. I didn’t have a lot of time to play with it. I will get used to it in a few days hopefully, Well, there is not much to get used to anyways. This is the Japanese model, so it came with a Japanese layout keyboard and Japanese Windows 7 Home Premium. I managed to install English language packs. Only Ultimate and Professional has official support. But there is this little tool called Vistalizator and I managed to install English language pack through it. Everything is good now. And the Japanese keyboard is no problem for me now. It used to be a pain in the ass at first (that is, when I came to Japan), but now I have gotten used to it.

I have installed almost all the stuff I need to install. Haven’t installed Office yet. Once that is done, I am good. Then I need to copy my music, pictures and some movies. I am going to reserve the CX-500 to this laptop. I don’t use it for anything else. I am using the Zagg Smart Buds with the iPhone all the time. I have got used to them. When I tried the CX-500 today after a long time, they felt funny. Open-mouthed smile

Anyways, I got to sleep now. It is 2330hrs now. This is my first laptop. I might add some upgrades with time such as another 2GB RAM and maybe an SSD when they become cheap. But that won’t happen anytime soon. I wonder if I should buy a bluetooth mouse for this as well. I hate trackpads. >_>

2 comments:

  1. Good choice since you will have some lifeline everywhere you go. Any broadband connections as the icing of the cake?

    ReplyDelete
  2. There aren't any cheap broadband connections here.

    Besides, if that was a requirement, I would have chosen something that has inbuilt 3G support. I don't like hanging stuff from the laptop. :D

    ReplyDelete

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