I
bought a new laptop. Cost me nearly a thousand dollars. This is a big
expense, especially when I'm about to enter an uncertain period in my
life. But this isn't just a totally irrational expenditure—I figure
that I'm going to be moving around a lot more in the coming months, and
thus will want to have a good computer to bring with me. Robert Jr.,
while I have never for a minute regretted buying him, has several
deficiencies that have become quite annoying—inability to play
movies (due to slow speed), lack of a DVD or even CD-ROM drive, operating
system (this could be fixed, but with only 96M of RAM, nothing good will
also be peppy), small storage capacity, and most annoyingly (in that it
doesn't just mean I can't do certain things, but annoyingly interferes
with almost everything I try to do on him), an incredibly flaky
pointing device. Anyway, here are two descriptions of Robert III.
Non-geek version: Robert III is fast—about twice as fast as Laura, in fact. [At the time of writing, this was accurate, but Laura has since been upgraded.] He probably can't play really new games (I haven't tried yet), but older or slower ones should be fine. He can play DVDs and burn CDs. He weighs about the same as Robert Jr. (7ish pounds). His screen is big, he has a touchpad, and he runs Windows XP (which I've managed to make act mostly like Windows 2000). He has a decent amount of storage for music, movies, pictures, etc. but not anywhere close to as much as Laura. He has wireless, but only because I gave Robert Jr.'s wireless card to him. He should be able to display on a TV once I get the cable. Oh, and he has lots of blue blinky lights.
Geek version: Athlon 1.53 Ghz, 256M RAM minus 64 for shared video memory = 64M usable, some non-Radeon ATI video card [I was mistaken—it's actually a Radeon IGP], 30G hard drive, 14" (I think) [15", actually] screen @ 1024x768, 24 (CD-R write) x 10 (CD-R/W write) x 24 (CD-R read) x 8 (DVD read) DVD + CD-R/W combo drive (Toshiba SD-R2312), 1 CardBus slot currently occupied by an ORiNOCO Silver 802.11b card, 1 Firewire port, 2 USB ports, 3ish hour battery life (depends a LOT on what you're doing), built-in 10/100 Ethernet, built-in Winmodem, S-Video TV out. HP ze4315us if you want to look it up, although there seems to be very little information about this model online.