I've been doing some of the latest work on my "Clean Game" on a new laptop I just bought today from Microcenter. It's an Acer Aspire 5516 with 2 GB RAM and 160 GB hard drive. It's not great (only single core -- the dual core was only $50 more, though), but it was only $300! What a deal; I couldn't pass it up seeing as how I'll be taking a 10 day vacation to South Padre Island, TX in August, and there'll be wireless internet access there, and I don't dare be totally disconnected from work for that long. (Actually I didn't think about it until my boss was remarking to a colleague how I'd be gone for 10 whole days in a row, and then I thought to myself, hey that's right... if I'm going to be there, that means I won't be here!
. So I figure there will be lulls during which I can check email at my leisure. Then there might not be quite so much of a heap of work to come back to.
Did I mention this is only $300!?
This is amazing. There are less capable itty bitty NetBooks that cost more than this full size (wide-screen) laptop! This was really the time to buy for me. Finally hit the balance between "I don't have a good excuse to own a laptop because I'm always around a desktop" and "sometimes it'd be nice to have a laptop". I hooked it up to my 42-inch TV with a VGA cable and have been playing with it for a few hours now. I had the foresight to also get a wireless keyboard and mouse so I can use it from the couch. I finally remembered to set a frame rate limit on my clean game because it was running fast on this computer.
Anybody who's been on the edge of getting a laptop, look for an Acer Aspire 5516 ... did I mention it's only $300?
