So here’s one of those “What the hell are you complaining about, Dave?” kind of situations.
Margie thinks I should buy myself a new notebook.
For the last decade or so, I’ve had a company laptop (well, I’ve had multiple company laptops, in sequence). I’ve learned to work and play on a single machine, dealing with the limitations of whatever standard hardware I was given in exchange for the convenience and lack of cost.
My current laptop is over four years old now. It’s more than showing its age, but the financial climate in the company is such that I don’t want to press for something new. And the standard models are nothing to write home about anyway. I’ve maxed out the RAM, added an external drive for home to store my games and music and photos. But it’s a mediocre situation at best.
Margie keeps suggesting I should buy a new laptop for personal use (laptop because of our current work/playspaces in the house). There are some very nice units for under $1K that are twice the machine (in nearly all ways) of my current IBM ThinkPad.
So, plusses and minuses.
Plusses:
- Big, bright, shiny new machine with a much better graphics card (for gaming), faster processor, more RAM, and more onboard HD space than my current internal and external drives combined.
- A machine for vacation that doesn’t have work stuff to be stolen.
- A machine for work that doesn’t have personal files on it.
Minuses:
- Switching back and forth between machines. Setting up all the little sync widgets to make files and bookmarks and the like available on both. Maintaining software on two machines.
- Um, costs money.
- For right now, Windows Vista. Not the worst fate in the world, but if I wait several months, Win7 will be out.
- There are times when I would potentially want to travel with both machines. Ugh. Though, honestly, we’ve done that before (bringing both Katherine’s/the family laptop and Margie’s work machine).
- Installing and configuring a new machine. Ugh.
It’s a different enough arrangement that, as is my typical wont, I’m kind of leery about just leaping into it … though for most people, having their spouse encourage them to buy a bright shiny new laptop would result in a person-sized hole in the air as they raced off to go do so.
I suspect I will be going ahead and moving forward with this, sooner or later, esp. if I hit a pain point somewhere with the current machine. On the other hand, it would be nice to wait for Win7.
We’ll see.