My old PC laptop served me well, but….

I loved my Acer Ferarri laptop when I got it two years ago. Fast, good looking, lots of features like a card reader. It has served me well. When I got the Ferarri, it had Windows XP preloaded on it. I immediately wiped it and installed XP fresh. Ran great for quite while. But a few months ago, I decided that it was time to wipe XP and reload it again, because it was starting to slow down (as windows does over time). This time, I decided to give Vista a shot, since it works OK on some of our other systems here at the office.

More after the jump.

Vista destroys my Ferarri laptop’s performance

Vista went onto the Ferarri without a lot of problems, but I noticed something peculiar: my fan was running constantly, and the laptop got hot – REAL hot. Apparently, the AMD processor was forced to work a lot harder than usual, and instead of my fan coming on only during heavy multi-tasking, it was staying on all the time. The Ferarri got so hot, that it was too hot to put on my lap without a pillow or something. It is pretty funny now, but one time I even smelled something burning – it was the smell of the pillow getting hot (not good). I can laugh about it now, but it was annoying as hell. My battery life dropped substantially, due to the fan and the processor working harder. I ended up getting only 40 minutes of life out of it, and my bootup times were incredibly long.

Time for a new laptop

As I started to shop for a new laptop, I hadn’t intended to get a Mac, but I was aware that they had new laptops coming out. I also heard about the new thin and light line of laptops at Best Buy. I went and checked em out, and bought this Toshiba:

Bought this Toshiba from Best Buy, and took it back

It is a nice 13.3″ thin and light laptop, with a 2.4ghz processor in it and 2GB of ram. I got it home, and was pretty excited about it until the mouse button broke – not good. Took it back to exchange it, and they were out of them. Also wasn’t happy with the 1280 x 800 resolution (ick).

Got a new MacBook, then took it back for a MacBook Pro

What they DID have, was the new Macbooks, with DDR3 RAM (twice as fast as regular ram), and a lot of new features. I can run 99% of my software on the Mac already (Adobe, MS Office, Firefox, Adium IM, etc), so I didn’t have a worry about running Windows apps. I bought the regular Macbook, and brought it home. Once I got it home, I wanted some of the features on the Macbook Pro (express slot to use for a card reader), and the bigger screen (1440 x 900).

My New 15″ MacBook Pro

I had to drive to Concord Pike (202) to the Best Buy up there to get the 15″ Macbook Pro, and I love it. It is super-fast, and I my USB celluar card screams on it. I am going to put 4GB of DDR3 ram into it next week. I haven’t turned on the Ferarri laptop for two days now.

Initial Thoughts

• super-bright LED screen
• backlit keyboard is nice
• nice fast bootup
• two video cards
• great speakers
• Entourage (Outlook for the Mac) works great with my Exchange hosting
• Cellular card browsing is much faster
• Adium is way better than Trillian (for instant messaging)
• Bluetooth mouse works up to 50 feet!
• Nice and thin

So far, so good. I like it.