Working where ever on the laptop

In early 2003, I bought a custom HP laptop online. It has a better mix of what I wanted than the retail versions available at the time. It's a 2 GHz Celeron with a half-gig of RAM, 15” 1400x1050 screen and 60 gig hard drive. It replaced my aging Sony (P3/450) which had a hard time running Visual Studio.

There are only two problems with it. The first is that it's not made with laptop parts, so its three fans and lots of heat last about 90 minutes unplugged with the Wi-Fi card plugged in. The other issue is that the video hardware isn't great, so forget about real gaming. The first isn't that big of a deal because I rarely need to go away from power, and the second isn't an issue because I don't game mobile. Both are problems I could live with considering it cost $1,200 at the time, a price point you couldn't get to with a screen that size in most cases.

Anyway, since quitting my day job to write the book, I'm surprised at how much I've been using it all around the house. My desktop has a pair of 17” LCD's and a natural keyboard that allows me to peck away for hours (laptop keyboards are kinda cramped). It's a really tricked out machine. Still, with the laptop I can sprawl out on the chase in the “red room” (we have red furniture to match the Jurassic Park pinball machine and movie posters), open the three six-foot windows and hang out with the cats as they watch birds in the butterfly garden just outside. It's everything I couldn't have working in a cubicle.

That gets me to the status report after one month solo, but that's a post for another day...