Laptop

My dear big Dell 17" is dead. It turns on for 3 seconds and then goes off, no matter which F key I hit during that 3 seconds. There had been no sign of it. It all happened in a sudden. I tried to turn it on one evening and that is. I looked up the web and it seems to be a common problem of Dell's laptops. People say it is a problem of BIOS and you can reset it by either taking out and replacing the battery for the BIOS, which needs some dissembling, or simply drain the battery by disconnecting the laptop from power for a few weeks.

Now 2 weeks had passed and no sign of reviving. And at the same time I figured I do not need a laptop at home as much as I thought. If I really need to use a computer to edit photos, which is the most heavy-duty work I would use my laptop for, I can just stay late at work and use my work computer. It is only 5 minutes drive from home after all. Without a laptop at home I use the time spent browsing/chatting with friends reading books, and I go to bed early at night and get up early in the morning too. Better life-style, huh?

Well, but I have still ordered a new laptop online. I was about to wait till Dell announces their mini-laptops using Intel's latest mobile Atom CPU. But a friend reminded me my Dell dies in 4 years, and his in 5 years.

So after researching some sturdy and reliable brands and reading numerous users' reviews, I goes for Lenovo. They've got a new line called IdeaPad, which appears to be a merge of Lenovo's own consumer laptops and IBM's sturdy ThinkPads. Good design and good price. I've ordered a 1.8 GHz Duel Core with 667 Mhz Bus and 2 MB L2 cache, a NVIDIA graphic card with 256 MB of memory, 250 GB of hard disk, a max-out 4 GB of RAM, and a 15" display. All for $949. It shall arrive today.

Lenovo IdeaPad Y510