I recently found myself in need of a new laptop. With a tight budget and moderate needs, I knew it wasn’t going to be easy to find a product that would do what I wanted and still be in my price range.
As a Network Technician and a Web Designer, I needed a machine that would have enough storage to store all my software, projects for my clients, and still be able to handle an occasional temporary operating system backup from a client’s machine. The qualifying candidate also had to have a decent amount of RAM and a reasonably fast processor to keep up with the demands of multitasking and using Studio MX ’04 on a daily basis.
At first, I checked the auction sites, the refurbished outlets, and the wholesale warehouses. I found a few good deals for under $500, but nothing that would handle the processing load that Studio MX 2004 would place on it. The average machine had 256MB of PC133 RAM, a 20GB HDD, and a 1.0GHz Pentium processor. Not too shabby for a student machine, but for daily service in the fields I work in, not nearly enough space or power to keep up with my demands.
I quickly realized that a new laptop would be needed in order to...