Friday, October 26, 2007

Shedding my desktop husk

I have been planning a computer upgrade or rebuild since the last computer I built almost two years ago. I love following tech gear news and building my own rigs to suit my personal needs. It tends to be cheaper than going with a prebuilt and the power per dollar ratio just can't be matched. There is great satisfaction in building and tweaking your own machine and the pitfalls of being your own IT guy can teach you volumes of useful knowledge.

I have always focused on desktop computing though. Laptops never seemed to have enough power to make them practical and their price put them just out of reach. In recent years though laptops have gone down in price and gone up in computing power. I have also increased my net worth to the point where raman noodles just down seem like a necessity any more. So now my interest is peeked, but I still don't see any reason to leave the desktop. Until we got a laptop in the house.

Crystal, as a teacher in Henrico county is issued a laptop, just like the students. Ninety nine percent of the time she uses it to make lesson plans and other do other teachery things. Once in a while I will get a hold of it and check my email, write a blog post or watch the newest episode of Diggnation. This got me thinking about not being in one fixed location for all the other computer stuff I do. Gaming, web design, video editing, etc. Why be stuck in a dark room upstairs when I could be outside on the patio or sitting at the coffee table.

So now I want a laptop that can fill all my computing needs, but there is a twist. What if it were a Mac? My fingers burned just typing that. Crystal's laptop is a Mac though so I have grown to love the OS. But what about gaming? Boot camp seals the deal, I can have my cake and eat it too with gaming on Windows and everything else on the Mac. Wednesday night we went to the local apple store and I fell in love with the Macbook Pro. I feel dirty, but I think I can accept feeling dirty as long as my needs are filled. Kind of like a sailor on shore leave.

1 comment:

Grant said...

A gateway drug, my friend. Next stop, a laptop with Linux.