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.