Dec 6 Update

Remember Pearl Harbor tomorrow.

Well, we are enjoying our time in Houston. Even with the record breaking snow fall on Friday.

But we have been very busy. As usual, we had a several page shopping list. Things that are usually not available, but sometimes just too expensive outside the US. Yes, some things are cheaper in the US. For example, computers, and Dave’s 5.8 year old Dells needed replacing. He loved Dells for many years, but he had so many identical hardware failures on his 2 identical Precision M60s that he was looking forward to some new and reliable computers.

The M60s were very high end computers and only very recently eclipsed in hardware capability, but they had lots of parts fail, motherboards, screens, video cards, etc, and Dave was very glad that he had the “International Fix Anything that Breaks” warranty, but it expired in Jan 2009 and several high dollar items failed after. Even though his credit card added a year of warranty, it is a major hassle to get the parts sent to Turkey. One of the downsides of travel.

But, the new Dell computers that Dave was interested in had IT experts that buy 50 or 100 computers for big companies writing in the feedback columns that they were seeing high failures, unlike the dependable Inspiron models they had been buying for years.

Dave took this to mean that Dell cannot be trusted until they have several years of “good grades.” So, now he had to look at all of the countless laptops out there today. Ugh! What a long job.

Well, he recently chose an ASUS UL50Vt that says that it has 12 hr battery life due many ingenious power saving tricks. Since the battery has less capacity than his M60s, we hope that this means that when we are sailing it will use much, much less electricity. It also has a cool feature that it recognizes Dave when he sits down in front of it. It logs him in without him having to touch the computer or enter passwords. Tre Cool!

The bad news so far is that ASUS included a lot of perhaps interesting software, but has nearly NO documentation, so it is a guessing game as to how these things work or even what they are for. Grrrrrrr! Dell was prolific with excellent documentation and Dave has high documentation standards as a result.

Time will tell how the old software will work on Window 7 Pro 64 bit computers, But the new computers cost so much less than any one of the last 4 computers that he has had, so he could spend a little on software and still be way ahead. The UL50Vt seems to be a good to very good laptop with an outstanding battery life and super low power consumption. (Time will tell if that claim is correct.)

His other new computer is a Hewlett Packard dv6t Quad. That means that in a manner of speaking that it has 4 CPUs or ‘brains’ and allows ‘hyperthreading’ so that it can do several things at once, IF the software is smart enough to figure that out. It was on sale the day Dave bought it and even though he’d already decided what he wanted, it was a pleasant surprise to get over $400 off and several free upgrades to features that Dave would not have gotten, but when they are free, why not.

Tip: Once you have narrowed the choices to a few models, do a Goggle on

dv6t rebate

But use your computer name instead of dv6t. There was a $200 off coupon, just for the asking. He found it totally by accident, but what a nice surprise!

Dave is somewhat dubious about that 4 things at once stuff, but thinks that it is a nearly state of the art computer that will be able to do anything that he needs for the next several years and hold it’s value well. But, when anyone can get a laptop for under $300 that is probably fine for the main uses, perhaps in 3 years we will switch to low end computers. The jury is out on that one.

Sorry to drag on about this. Can you tell that Dave wrote it??? Happy Holidays.

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