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New laptop - Toshiba A200

Posted April 8th, 2008 in Hardware & Gadgets

I've had a Compaq EVO N1020v laptop/notebook for just over 5 years and the monitor has completely died on me. I like to be able to do a bit of work in the evenings while watching TV on the couch, and fortunately there are some bargain laptops/notebooks around these days. I'm not really all that fussed about mobility, battery life, weight etc because I'll really only be using it at home, so decided to go for something pretty cheap. After a little bit of looking around I bought a Toshiba A200 yesterday.

The Compaq

I bought the Compaq notebook when I first started contracting work in January 2003 as my primary work machine; I would use it both at my home office and when I worked at the customer's office. It was set up as a dual boot Linux/Windows machine, but I pretty much only used Linux on it and ran Windows in a VMWare Workstation Virtual Machine when I needed to use Internet Explorer for testing, or Adobe Photoshop and Dreamweaver

Anyway, it served me well; eventually I got a separate desktop machine and started using the notebook less and less. At some stage late last year the monitor started playing up and displaying very faintly if it was positioned incorrectly. If I moved it into the right spot it would then work ok. Then one day no matter where I positioned it, it was faint. I managed to get under the case and fiddle with the cables which attach the mainboard to the monitor and if I tugged them into the correct place the monitor would work for a bit.

Then last week the monitor completly died. Something seems to have broken inside there are some weird lines on it and what looks like liquid inside the display, and there's no output at all. Plugging it into an external monitor works of course, but it's too annoying using it like that because it's in effect just another desktop. So I decided to get a cheap new notebook.

The Toshiba

After a few days looking at various options I decided to get a Toshiba A200, installed with Vista Business and with 2GB of RAM, 15.4 widescreen (1280x800), 160GB HDD. Here's a pic of a similar one that I got from Google images. Mine looks pretty much the same except the speakers are slightly different and the keys are black.

I played around with it a bit last night and will be making a few posts this week about useful, interesting and annoying things with Vista and MS Office etc. So far I don't really see what all the fuss is about Vista (both negative and positive) other than the annoying user account control thing. Other than that, I think it looks nice and seems to work pretty well (I don't seem to have issues with resource hogging, but that will be due to having 2GB of RAM), but it's just another iteration of Windows when it comes down to it. More thoughts later this week.

If you're in New Zealand and are interested in getting a cheap notebook, Toshiba New Zealand are running a promotion this month where you get $100 cashback after purchase. You simply print off a document and post it in and they send you back a cheque for $100.