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After holding up for so long, I’ve finally found The One worthy enough to replace my faithful partner of 6 years. My IBM ThinkPad has been my partner in crime for 6 years. 6 years! Talk about money well-spent! I got it winter of 1998 in Vancouver. Back then, it was the fastest, spunkiest laptop any college kid could ever dream of, or any tech-savvy yuppy would want to get his/her hands on. During its first 2-3 years, it had played an instrumental part in supporting a long-distance love affair I had eventually gotten tired and bored of. My college papers, thesis, scripts and other projects wouldn’t have been possible without my trusty ol’ ThinkPad pal. Up until last week, it had accompanied me on every out-of-town-trip I had and continued to serve me well in sustaining friendships I have established around the world. Up until its retirement, it could still do Flash and Photoshop actions although it was clearly begging for mercy. Its gentle Pentium 1 powered soul, 32 mb RAM and tiny memory, I’m afraid, could no longer meet my more-than-just-word-processing needs, let alone have the strength to meet Adobe’s latest software minimum requirements. “It’s too slow!” I complained to my friend, Ferddie, to which he corrected me saying “It’s not slow, in fact, it’s working in tip-top factory-new condition…it’s just that the new softwares you feed it are too fast and you demand too much from it” My wise friend’s got a point. The ThinkPad really still is in the same condition it was in 6 years back…it hasn’t changed a bit and that’s the problem…it just hasn’t evolved and its painfully slow performance in meeeting my demands has left me on the verge of lunacy for the past few years already. It really is amazing how I’ve managed to survive.
Anyhow, I found The One during a trip to Singapore over the weekend. Since it was the so-called Great Singapore Sale weekend, I made a bee-line to SimLim Square right away where all the techie stuff were being sold. As a very happy, satisfied IBM user, I was loyal to the brand and had my heart set on getting a ThinkPad again. My heart skipped a beat when I saw the right specs printed on an IBM flyer: at least 512 mb RAM and 60 gigs of memory, a SuperDrive/DVD writer and WiFi enabled. Upon inquiring from store to store though, my heart sank as I was told that all stores selling IBM had run out of stock of the model I wanted and that I would have to wait 2 more days until the next delivery came….but that would be too late as 2 days from then would be the day I’d be returning to Manila…. So with a heavy heart, I trudged along to the Apple Store along Wheelock Place on Orchard Road with my aunt who was going to get an iBook. For the longest time, all of my creative kickass artsy friends have been convincing me to switch to a Mac, enumerating to me a million and one different reasons why a Mac was better than a PC/Windows-based OS. Though I’m quite comfortable and adept with the Mac OS environment too, it was hard for them to convince me due to my long-standing relationship with my PC-based ThinkPad. But then… since the ThinkPad I wanted had run out of stock, the 15-inch Powerbook that was on display seemed pretty handsome and it fell in the same price range of the ThinkPad I had wanted… the feeling was almost like falling in love again with a totally different object of affection on the same day…and boy did it feel like being hit by a ton of bricks when I was told that they had run out of stock of the 15-inch PowerBook too! No, I told them, I did not want the 12-inch PowerBook, it’s too small for me…. No I did not want the 14-inch iBook either, and no, I cannot afford the 17-inch PowerBook. (at that point on, I was feeling very emotional already ….gosh….why can’t I just shop for clothes or something…but im not exactly a clothes-gal…)
Anyways, to make the darn story short, I did find the right one finally…and it came with so many freebies too! — a 512mb USB drive, a CF-card reader, an optical mouse, a huge golf umbrella, a water bottle, 3 bottles of mineral water (?!), an Incredibles skateboard and mousepad, and a fully functional brand-new XBOX (my son was so overjoyed with this early bday present =)
Here’s what I got…. A 15-inch *cough*Toshiba*cough* Qosmio with 1gb RAM, 80 gb HDD, MultiSuperDrive, Bluetooth, WiFi, great speakers and a really, really nice, super bright, high-luminance screen that’s waaaaaay better than any laptop screen I have ever seen. The Qosmio is Toshiba’s line of AV notebooks which is why it’s got a really nice sound system and screen, perfect for audio-visual presentations. The downside of it – and it really gets me depressed when I think about it – is that it is as thick as my old ThinkPad and not to mention, a lot heavier too! Sheesh! I was concentrating too much on finding the right features that the weight and thickness of it didn’t occur to me until all the paperwork was done and the salesman handed me my newly-purchased package … But it’s too late for any complaints now…. I just hope it’ll be sturdy and reliable enough to last me another 6 years. So there. =)
