1st Sep
2005

At long last! I've managed to grab myself a decent laptop. Its an Acer Aspire 3003WLMi. I've been after one for some time, I've just not had the fundage. However, after a rather nice suprise from the tax man, I started shopping around.

ebuyer came through again, with the cheapest deal I could find, about £560. The delivery was spot on: I ordered it on Sunday night, to arrive the following Wednesday, plus there was a Bank Holiday in between. The courier even phoned me up to let me know he was on his way. Makes a change from endlessly waiting for [insert crummy courier name here] all day long, only for them to turn up at 7pm, usually resulting in a wasted day...

The machine itself looks sweet - silver, slimline and pretty light. Pull a couple of stickers off and its ready to go. And ready to go it is: straight out of the box with the AC adapter, and the battery itself only took an hour or so to top itself up. The bundled software etc was pretty good: no useless, bloated utilities and device software. The machine comes with CDs for Windows XP Home and Works. I blitzed it anyway, repartitioned the hard drive (a comfortable 60Gb) and got XP Pro on there. The built in 801.11g wireless worked immediately: nice, but perhaps a testament to the crap security of our home network. Better fix that.

The only downer so far is the speakers. Admittedly, most laptops don't come with brilliant inbuilt speakers, but after hearing the quality from my parents' new Toshiba laptop this one leaves a lot to be desired.

So one day in and I'm happy. For the price, I've got a nippy little bit of kit. If it wasn't pissing it down here, I'd be working outside.