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New Laptop

I was visiting mom this past week while she was recovering from minor foot surgery. She had planned to get a new laptop so that she could use it next week to get some work done while still on the couch (she has to keep her foot elevated for another week or so).

I placed an order for one for her with Lenovo on April 4. The original note said that it should ship in 1-2 weeks. Then on April 18, I got a note saying that it wouldn't ship till May 5. This didn't do us any good so I cancled the order.

Waiting a month to get a computer? Hell by that time it's probably already worth 20% less than when you paid for it.

Anyway, we decided to bite the bullet and buy one locally. The first stop was compUsa where I quickly discovered that the only thing on the sales floor of the Windows variety was packed with Vista.

Mom was come a long way, but she is still very un-savvy when it comes to computers. She needs XP because that's what she knows. Also, I've never used Vista which means I wouldn't be able to answer questions and frankly, I'm a big fan of waiting till after the first major service patch has been released before moving onto a new Microsoft platform. (Or most other software for that matter.)

We went around to Office Depot and Staples too, and the case was the same. No machines on the floor besides the odd "display model" that didn't come with Vista.

Luckily, you can still by XP in the box and the fact that we tried a few different places worked out pretty well anyway.

We ended up with a $500 Compaq C500 laptop and purchasing a boxed version of Windox XP for \~$160 from staples.

I must say I'm pretty impressed with the laptop. I didn't use Vista on it at all, but it runs XP very nicely. It's more than adequate for the word documents, email and web surfing that is going it's going to be used for.

The average price of the laptops at CompUSA was way higher. I think I saw one that was about $700, and a few for around $800, but most were $1,000+. It's odd to think, but going an office store was way better than buying at a computer store.