My New Laptop

I went to IT Show 2006 at Suntec City yesterday. Xbox 360 took up a huuuge booth. Meh. Nintendo took two for some reason. And they didn’t even have any DS Lites on display. Anyway, the main reason for my trip was to splurge put my savings to good use and pick up a laptop. My main requirements were:

1. Intel Core Duo
2. Less than 2.5 kg
3. Glossy widescreen
4. Well-cooled
5. Non-integrated graphics maybe…

After collecting handouts from every major brand name except Dell and HP (…seriously), I was torn between Asus and Samsung. Both are 15.4 inch WXGA and 80 gb HDD. The Asus one is slightly heavier than my requirement but has dedicated graphics (X1400 Radeon if I remember correctly). The Samsung one is nearly 300 SGD cheaper and weighs only 2.48 kg, but has 512mb of RAM instead of 1gig, and Intel GMA 950 graphics.

I couldn’t decide, so the Samsung salesperson threw in a free upgrade to 1gig RAM (which sealed the deal) and a 100gb USB external harddrive (which I didn’t really care for). And now I’m the proud owner of a Intel Core Duo Samsung X60. Weee.

It’s very cool and quiet, which is probably not possible on a laptop with dedicated graphics. I probably won’t be using it for games anyway. (At least not the ones that require 3D acceleration… if you know what I mean. *cough*)

The full specs are:

• Intel Core Duo T2300 (1.66 GHz)
• 1 GB DDR2 SDRAM
• 80GB 5400RPM HDD
• DVD-RAM drive
• 15.4 inch TFT WXGA
• SD, MMC, MS, MS Pro, xD reader
• Bluetooth, Wi-fi a/b/g, Firewire, VGA-out, S-video out

It’s very fast. I don’t notice any performance difference when multi-tasking as compared to my AMD-64 3500 with 2gig RAM desktop. Of course, I don’t think I’ll be running World of Warcraft on it…

Speaking of which…

Zephiris, lvl 60 Night Elf Rogue

Epic kitties are t3h win! Sadly, I’m only half-equiped with Shadowcraft and my mainhand sword is a lvl 51 quest reward. Sigh… Well that’s one two New Year resolutions done…

More blogging later.