time to upgrade?

Tuesday, October 14, 2003, at 11:28AM

By Eric Richardson

Today I finally got the last $1000 of my fall financial aid package. This means that I can finally look at getting a laptop. My main computer is an old PII-400 that's been through a lot. Since I've been here, USC has added wireless on campus, and that's really made me lust after having something I could pull out anywhere on campus and be online. Now comes the point where I have to find something cheap (under $1000) that has the feature set I want. You wouldn't think that would be a very hard thing to do, since I don't need much.

On a laptop, I care about the screen, wireless ethernet, and not much else. And yet, screen size and CPU speed are intrinsically linked in the minds of manufacturers. I don't want a P4. I want a crap CPU, a 10gig hard drive, and a nice screen.

Right now I'm looking at a Toshiba Satellite A10-S127. It's $899 from CDW, which seems decent to me.

Eric Richardson lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where he works on payments infrastructure for Cash App.

Past lives involved streaming audio for Southern California Public Radio, running a hyperlocal news site for Downtown Los Angeles, working on custom mapping code, and writing Perl at the Jet Propulsion Labratory.

Previously on this date...

2005
Field Trip
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2002
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2001
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2000
richardsons on the web
I was sitting around here today, waiting for a tape to record, just wandering around the web. On a whim, I decided to see who else in the world had a...