Recently my laptop died and I needed to replace it. The hardware, which wasn't that old (2 years), gave me a number of troubles, and I had quite the rigmarole from Toshiba. So I decided to move on, given I couldn't get it fixed, and purchase a new machine.
But what to get? The geek in me had to search around and examine different models. I'd bought an Acer for my son, and it seemed like a nice machine. I found some nice ones with long battery life on Amazon and was tempted to get one. However I've owned a couple Dells, and always been happy with them. My friend, Andy Warren, says to stick with what works, so Dell was under consideration.
A few people had recommended Lenovo, saying they were great machines, very well built, and with power. I heard other recommendations from other people, and true to the geek ideals, I spent a bunch of time reading about the specs for various machines, going through the build and customize wizards, and drooling over the upgrades. Just thinking about getting a quad core, with 8GB of RAM was exciting.
I think we often get caught up with "what is the best" of something. Whether it's a laptop, a car, or a technique for paging data results, I think many people try to ensure they make the best decision, or get the best thing. The reality is, however, that we never really know what's the best until we get it and see if it works for us. And even then we don't know it was really the best. Often we are satisfied with something that works, or complain about something that doesn't. Since most of us don't want to spend all our time testing things to see if we can find a "better" item, I think "it works well" satisfies most of our needs.
Ultimately I think I got a powerful machine that will work for the next 2-3 year for me, but it wasn't the cores, the speed, the memory, disk drive, etc. that made my choice. Those things weighed in, but ultimately it was The Little Stick that made my choice the "best" laptop for me.
Steve Jones
The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
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