New Laptop

I got a new laptop on Monday from Costco. It’s an HP Pavilion tx2513cl — So far I really like it. Thus far the idea of it is wonderful. It’s a tablet pc, so I can use the traditional keyboard and touchpad to navigate the screen, but I can also use my finger directly on the screen to click or move something, and moreso useful is the stylus for really doing so everything normal and so much more than that.

I like the size, it’s 12.1″ though the design has the battery sticking out the back, but the longer I work with it, it seems to provide some kind of stability, I am not sure how to put it into words.

Up to now I’ve always had a larger laptop (ever since having one, that is) but have seen the tiny sort, 10″ precisely and had a fascination with those for awhile, keeping steady with my 15.4″ HP. My hubby has been using a different laptop from work lately, not new, but a cast-off of someone else, it’s a 12″ Toshiba and that got me thinking about smaller computers again.

I wasn’t going to get something new like this, but the way things happened, it was possible. My now previous laptop was an HP Pavilion 5224. It had been acting badly, so when things went right and Costco had this nice laptop, it was do-able. Since that old HP has a “Best Buy 3-year warranty” on it, we brought it in last night, and will find out in the next few days whether or not they’ll [HP] fix it or let us get another.

This gives us options. We have me, hubby, and 4 children, three of who are getting bigger and bigger fast, and an extra computer laying around would be great. What we will be offered we don’t know, but the price on the paperwork is fairly high comparing todays market to what 2 years ago was. A Thousand bucks wasn’t much to plunk down. Before that it was a Compaq I’d had that got way too hot and was a problem, we paid close to or more than $2000 for it and ended up with being able to get from stock of the store we were in whatever we wanted (because of the entire affair with trying to get the thing fixed, it was a bad, bad time with customer support … store manager was more than pleased to help us when CS didn’t) and settled happily for a lesser priced product, a Sony that was worth $1800 those days. I’m nearly shocked looking back from this perspective of time, computers morph so quickly into different animals. Prices go down, power and functionality go up.

My little laptop I’m currently using is pricier because of it’s size and tablet-ability. The regular laptops in the 15″ range are well below $1000 now, well, well, well below it for some of them. Comparing them to the laptop we just turned in under the warranty, whoa! That old (ha, ha) thing was/is Athlon 64. We are so far past that now.

The biggest difference in this and my other computers is the OS. This is Vista. They were all XP. I am liking things about Vista, jumping through a few hoops to find what I want on occasion, but I do like the LOOK of it and how many things function. I hope it’s been long enough since it’s introduction that the bugs are –moreso than not– worked out.