Ideal laptop configuration?
After four years and a few drops my 500 MHz IBM Thinkpad seems ready for retirement. This posting and associated comments are intended to produce a collaborative ideal configuration for a new laptop.
The mission: Use exclusively when traveling, often for weeks at a time. I would like to play music in my hotel rooms, ideally from built-in speakers but possibly from little portable speakers that are packed separately (I have a weird little AAA-powered Creative speaker system now that is sort of okay for background music). I would like to copy large high-res photos from professional digital cameras, usually by pulling a CF or SD card from the camera and plugging it somehow into the laptop. I want every possible means of connecting to the Internet, wired and wireless, except for telephone (don’t have an ISP and life is too short for dialup). Battery life is not very important as I’ll usually be using the machine some place where power is available.
Here’s what I think I want
- 120 GB (or larger) disk drive. I upgraded my current laptop with a 48 GB drive nearly 2 years ago and am dismayed to discover that the largest 2.5″ drives available right now are 80 GB. Was Moore’s Law revoked for notebook drives? Anyone with inside knowledge know when/what the next step in disk drives will be fore notebooks? I don’t want to bother re-installing all my old software onto a disk smaller than 120 GB.
- TrackPoint nubby pointing device in the middle of the keyboard, as popularized on the IBM Thinkpad. I was never able to adapt to those pad devices that are most common for laptops.
- analog video/audio output to enable playback of DVDs on hotel room TVs, some of which have A/V inputs
- reasonably high quality built-in speakers
- as many USB 2.0 ports as possible (at least two because I’ll want to use an accessory mouse that will chew up one)
- a built-in Webcam and microphone suitable for video conferencing. Supposedly MSN Messenger contains a reasonable quality video conferencing feature. Would also be nice to be able to make phone calls from the laptop in cases where a hotel provides high-speed Internet but expensive voice calls and/or the cell phone isn’t working in that area.
- built-in sockets for CF, SD, and other digital camera memory cards
- built-in 802.11b for sure, Bluetooth?, maybe something for mobile phone Internet would be nice, e.g., a GSM radio
- at least two PC card slots for expansion and the weird little card burner that I must use to keep my airplane’s GPS databases up to date
- mid-size screen and keyboard to keep the weight below 5 lbs. and the size compact
- Windows XP operating system (most aviation software is Windows-only)
It might be fun to play with the TabletPC software in order to add sketches and other personal annotations to emails, documents, photos, etc. Is this software ready for prime time? And does having a TabletPC interfere with the other goals?
Ideas anyone?
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