For a while, I enjoyed the company of my laptop, the Sony S360. It was a great laptop with a slim profile, light weight, great 13.3 screen, and powerful ATI Radeon 9700 graphics card. Unfortunately one day it took a head-dive down the stairs and was never the same. Occasionally it would throw a fit and completely freeze up. Well, recently it has been throwing these tantrums more frequently, as any slight movement to the laptop would render it useless.
However, as I looked into a placement laptop, I’m looking for:
- Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz+
- LED 13.3″ screen
- Lightweight, around 4 lbs or less
- HDMI or DVI port
- Bluetooth
- 802.11n
- Fingerprint scanner, fun to have
In the end, I found two laptops that fit my bill, the Dell XPS M1330 and Sony SZ750. I looked at the M1330, which is cheaper, and even though it is LED, seems to have poor viewing angle. There have also been many complaints about build quality. The Sony, on the other hand, has dual graphics card switch uses one to save power but the other one for serious gaming, but it does not have a built-in HDMI port. It does have a docking station with a DVI port, so I was almost about to pull the trigger on it when it became discontinued! What?!
Apparently the new Intel processor and chipset, Montevina, is coming out this summer, and everyone’s saying to wait for it. So what do I do in the mean time? Well, the laptop is pretty useless at the current moment, so I decided to do a little handiwork…
And transform it into a “desktop”… without the expandability and possibly dangerous to the touch, but this will have to do until the new laptops come out.
And yes, I did write this blog on that thing. 