Notebooks through the ages

Cameras and HD entertainment aren’t my only two obsessions as a geekboy. I used to have a thing for PDAs, handphones and notebooks. Fortunately, the tech compulsions don’t all occur at the same time (otherwise I’d be in perpetual deficit), but they usually occur as flavor of the month or year-quarter.

In any case, I thought it’d be fun to put together a list of notebooks I’ve used for the last 12 years now. The list goes like this:

This sort of table is illuminating because it shows several things:

• Notebook turnover is about 14 months. I think that has a lot to do with the fast depreciation of notebook value once warranty runs out.
• I’m about evenly split between ultraportables and full-featured notebooks. Actually, come to think of it, I oscillate between the two.

In general, I’ve had pretty good luck with notebooks with most having served me very well without failure. OK, there’s been two exceptions. The HP Omnibook 500 was a great machine with a very sexy chassis and color scheme, but the docking bay was just horrible with frequent failures to properly recognize the notebook when mounted. I think I had it sent to repair at Hewlett Packard three times within a year, after which I gave up and let it sit and gather dust at home. The Acer Travelmate had a quirky keyboard with a key that my fingernail kept getting stuck under. Moreover, it suffered three hardware failures, which fortunately were still properly covered under warranty. That said, I’ve had fond memories of the machine since I did a large amount of thesis writing on it.

Of the two current notebooks I’ve got, one is the always reliable IBM Thinkpad given by the school. The other personal one is a pretty recent acquisition: an NEC Versa E6310 which has a pretty OK graphics chipset to let me run game demonstrations for my lecture groups. Hopefully this one will last for a bit – or at least longer than the current average of 14 months.