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Friday, January 22, 2010

I've ordered a new toy

10:46 PM / Technology / 4 Comments

When I bought my Sony VAIO VGN-FZ11Z back in Autumn 2007, I thought it was the bee's knees. It was actually the first laptop I ever owned, and it was a far cry from the variety of clunky old rustbuckets that my dad had owned at different points throughout the 90s. It also had a BD-ROM drive, which was a big deal at the time, mainly because it allowed me to take screen captures of my BDs for the first time.

Things have changed a bit now, however. I now have a BD-ROM drive in my desktop machine, and I've come to see that, in some respects, I may have allowed the VAIO's drive to wow me at the expense of its other shortcomings. For one thing, it's pretty bulky and heavy. For another, its battery life is absolutely dismal. That's not much of a problem when it's sitting in my bedroom plugged in at the mains, which to be fair is where it is to be found most of the time, but on long trips it's a nightmare. Even in Performance mode, I get just over an hour's juice out of the battery before it gives out - less if I'm doing something CPU-intensive like playing a video file. This is partly due to the simple fact that rechargeable batteries become less effective over time, but it was never great, and I must confess to being more than a little jealous of my brother, who gets a good 3-4 hours out of his MacBook when running Windows on it.

Tonight, after a semi-lengthy period of perusing reviews and benchmarks of various different laptops, I decided to order an ASUS UL30A. It's smaller and lighter than my VAIO, has double the RAM and a significantly higher capacity hard drive, and best of all its battery lasts for ages. ASUS boasts 12 hours, which I immediately suspected was puffery, but the reviewers who have benchmarked it have all reported figures of between 8 and 10 hours, which is nothing to sniff at and far and away superior to what I'm getting at the moment. I found a new one on eBay for a very reasonable £500 and will be selling my VAIO forthwith in order to recoup some of that.

I'll let you know what it's like when it arrives.

4 Comments

 
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