Technology

I’m Writing This From Vista…

Yep, the new laptop arrived :)

For the “4 working days” option, that was pretty quick. It appears that Laptops Direct are pretty good.

I’m writing this while I wait for it to uninstall the trail of office 07 that came with it (peh, 03 for me :) ) ; and with follow up to my post about Vista not being so bad, I think I was right, it really is good. The only niggle so far is the constant “We need your permission to do this” popups, but apart from that, it’s fast, well behaved, and it’s not struggling with the heavy pages anything like my old one :P

The packaging suffered an identity crisis, though: the laptop cleary says R61i on the front, while all the packaging and instructions say R61e. Looking at the spec, it appears to be neither, the processor is more powerful than the one in the specification that I ordered, and the one that it thinks it is. Never mind, it’s all good :)

I love the aero interface, it’s all nice and friendly, and it’s fast too, which is always a bonus. The keyboard is nice and responsive, and the touches that come in the Lenovo ThinkVantage suite are excellent. Lenovo included their own suite of components that work perfectly with Vista, like their own security manager, wireless handler (which is good :D) and so on. It’s really, genuinely excellent.

[ this could quickly turn into a review, but never mind ]

The browsing seems to be handling the heavier sites better, too (I might have said that already) , but it’s loading miles faster than my old Inspiron did, although, fair play, it is 5 years old.

So, for a £360 laptop (including delivery :) ); this is really pretty good :)

I think that a bit more RAM might be a good idea, though, it’s sat here idling processor wise, but still using 830mb RAM. Vista, I suppose.. :P

You can find the laptop sales page at Laptops Direct here, and my post about replacing the old laptop, including some pictures, here.

© 2008 (fused).