I got to play with a new laptop last night at Fry's. It has a Blu-ray drive, and a very good screen.
Here is an excellent review of this laptop: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/edwardbaig/2006-06-28-vaio-blu-ray_x.htm This is the best picture I have ever seen on a lap-top. Maybe in 10 years the average laptop user will have something like this? A laptop with this many features would leave a lot of empty space on one's desk, as it could replace a TV, a USB hub, a back-up storage device, a gaming console, etc. Several of the laptops in the pricey range have controls above the keyboard to help you manage your song list as you are listing to music. This is pretty cool. It is very similar to having a tiny IPod on the screen and fades away after a few seconds. You can scroll thru about 1 song per second, so it only takes a few minutes to find a song if you had a huge playlist. How do they get those tiny speakers to sound so good? The newest laptops have all done away with the parallel port. I think a select few of the pricey models may have an eSata port, which claims to be faster than Firewire 800, which only the Macs have. http://howtobuyalaptop.com/firewire-port.htm I think the biggest news in laptops today, is the low prices of the low end models. I have seen spanking new laptops for under $ 500. They have Vista pre-installed however, they are too slow. Maybe these buyers should un-install Vista and re-install XP or something else ? Anyone who pays over $ 2,000 for a laptop, should get the features above, plus they should receive some sort of satelite tracking device in case they missplace it. And an integrated internet-video-cell phone. And a swiss-army plastic toothpick and tweezers. And GPS system. A built-in library of songs and music. And software included like an Office package - not just as a trial. I personally would not "yet" buy a laptop with Vista on it. But unless you buy a Mac, you don't have much choice. You could buy an older XP laptop, but you would miss out on some of the cool features of the even the new low-end models. And getting a linux laptop, isn't something the average computer user is going to want. On a slightly related note, here in Houston, CompUSA is closing 4 of it's stores and they have a sale on what little is left. The best deals seemed to be on compact-flash cards and motherboards. I think I saw an Extreme III - 8 gigabyte CF card for $ 259. David Locklear --------------------------------------------------------------------- Visit our website: http://texascavers.com To unsubscribe, e-mail: texascavers-unsubscr...@texascavers.com For additional commands, e-mail: texascavers-h...@texascavers.com
