Monday, June 29, 2009

My First Laptop

Hi, I want to to tell you about my laptop purchase and its decision process. Firstly I wanted to have laptop for programming, music and communication purpose. Initially I wanted to have 'Gateway' refurbished laptop in india. in Gateway i can have Turion 64 bit, 3GB DDR2/3. 320 GB at 25,000. But it is very difficult to get a Gateway lappy in India, unless one of your friend is coming back to india and he can buy for you. After searching a lot online, I decided go to local market, Nehru Place. NP is india biggest grey market. I went to all showrooms but unable to find suitable AMD turion 64 bit model. because I use GNU/linux, I can utilise full advantage of 64 bit processor and OS. Finally I decided to buy Intel based laptop. people have misconception about processor speed and they often try to buy the latest processor and the price difference between 2.0 GHz and 2.2 GHz contain difference of 1000 to 2000 INR. frankly speaking, by speed, 2.0 and 2.8 will not produce any significant speed difference. Speed comes from RAM speed. So I decided to buy DDR3 based RAM. Again people think that 4GB is better then 2B RAM. in most of the case, the RAM utilisation is just around 1-2GB or less. even I never found any use of swap space. So I decided to stick with 2GB DDR3 RAM. I wanted to have storage of 320 GB. Now comes to features. Most of the people never go to see what exactly are the features they are getting. The most important feature is Sound. You are supposed to listen movies and sounds. For my laptop i decided to have Dolby digital sound. The next feature is connectivity, Gigabit LAN and 802.11 N* support wifi and bluethooth. Do you believe I was able to get all these configuration within 29,500 from Nehru Place. Let me tell you the model number I selected Acer Aspire 4736z. Here is the full configuration of my laptop.


  • Intel Pentium Dual Core T4200 processor (1MB L2 cacahe,2GHz,800 MHz FSB)
  • Mobile Intel GL40 express chipset
  • 2GB DDR3 RAM, 1067 MHz
  • 320GB Hard Disk Space, 5400 RPM
  • Super Multi DVD writer
  • 14.1-inch HD Acer CineCrystal LED-Backlit TFT screen
  • Dolby Surround sound
  • 1366×768 resolution
  • Acer CrystalEye Webcam, 1.3 MP
  • Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n
  • Gigabit Lan
  • HDMI
  • 5-in-1 card reader
  • 3 USB v2.0 ports
  • 1 year international warranty