I’ve written about my laptop a number of times. Separately, I’ve written about Windows XP, Vista, Linux and what I might choose when buying a new laptop.
This morning, I ordered two identical laptops from PowerNotebooks.com, one for me and one for Lois. Here is the link to the specific model: PowerPro I 8:17. I max’ed out a bunch of the options (but not all), so these are extremely sweet machines.
First, a few words about PowerNotebooks.com. The last five laptops that I have paid for personally have all come from PowerNotebooks.com (with these two, that makes seven!). My current Sager NP8890 was the first one purchased from them, over four years ago. I still love the machine, and will definitely feel a bit like I’m cheating on it with my new one.
Since then, I’ve purchased two other Sager models, one for Lois, and one for my godson. I then bought a PowerPro for my goddaughter, and then a PowerPro for my godson. PowerNotebooks.com carries a number of brands. We’ve been extremely happy with our Sagers and PowerPros. They stand behind their machines, and have been incredible in solving problems when they’ve come up over the years. Pricing is very fair as well, for these extremely high-end machines.
I really can’t say enough about the choice and customer service offered by PowerNotebooks.com, and am proud to count myself among their happy and loyal customers.
Now for my choice of OS. I’ve railed in the past against Vista. At the time, it was inconceivable to me that I would ever install it on any machine under my control. While I was reasonably happy with XP, I was heavily leaning toward running Linux and having XP available in a virtual machine. I spent a few seconds considering a Mac, which most of the tech people I know use and love.
As much as the romance of running Linux appealed to me, I knew that I couldn’t remotely consider not having XP available in a VM (the same would be true if I bought a Mac). The more I thought about it, the more it annoyed me that I was desperately trying to work around pretending that I wasn’t somehow married to Windows. In other words, I wasn’t being pragmatic, and I like being pragmatic.
So, I spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about and reading as much as I could about Vista, specifically Vista x64. As I noted in a previous post, Vista SP1 seemed to have solved the most heinous problems that I personally noticed in the original release of Vista.
Pragmatism has ruled the day (for me), and I am at peace with my decision. I have no doubt that I will love the PowerPro (from a hardware point of view). I will report back a few days after it becomes my regular machine on how I feel about Vista (64 bit or otherwise). That should be roughly two weeks from now.
While I can’t imagine that I’ll switch away from Vista, at least with this hardware choice, I could easily revert to XP or Linux. If I bought a Mac and didn’t like it, I could run XP natively as well, but I would have grossly overpaid for the hardware for that scenario.
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