Lapnotetopbooks
In the next couple of months, I will be helping two people (Katy and John) shop for notebook computers. Ever notice how they are no longer called “laptops” by any company? This is because, in terms of cooling, notebooks perform less than ideally on a lap. Anyhow, I am educating myself about wireless standards. I learned from kottke about cordless phone interference in the 2GH’z’ish range. I read some interesting C|Net articles about the future of 802.11; one columnist likened the standard to the x86 standard and the Ethernet standard. His point was, when a “critical mass” adopts a standard, even if that standard is not technically the best at that time, it will grow to dominate and evolve to meet the needs of the market which it serves. Think Betamax and VHS wars.
Anyhow, I have found that, when shopping for a computer, knowledge of how and the way in which you use it are more important than technical knowledge of the hardware. I found myself asking questions more along the lines of “What kinds of programs will be running, and what will they demand from the machine?” rather than “Do we leave one DIMM open for another stick of 512 ram?” The answer to the latter for us was, pay a little extra now and therefore leave one DIMM open for expansion. The answer to the first question is very challenging to arrive at because (a) it is difficult to say what programs will be running on this machine for these graduate school/vet school students and (b) my two shoppers are not sure what level of performance they will put up with. When I was buying my machine, I knew I used screen space like a dry hunk of bread soaks up sauce, so I invested in a larger monitor that reviewed well. I knew my tendency to hog disk space with piles of raw image files, and bought space accordingly.
So, when shopping for a computer, assess your needs now and in the future. Look at how you use the machine. Look at where you use it. Looks at how long you use it at a time. Examine your patience: is it high? I have found more patient people are content hanging onto machines for 4-6 years; they simply know the fact (and more importantly, accept it) that the machine will take longer to do basic tasks. In short, determining these personal tastes and usage habits make finding the “right” computer for a person far easier.