Finally took the laptop plunge

Z

zandor

Supreme [H]ardness
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Dec 14, 2002
Messages
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After finishing college with a CS degree & working in IT for 8 years as a Java developer I've finally taken the lappy plunge in style (to the tune of about $3000). Bloody expensive, but anything less than a dual core & 2GB ram sucks for J2EE development.
Up until now I've been a monster desktop builder (last 3 machines were duallies w/ SCSI), and this will be my first laptop. At least I'll be able to write off most of it as a business expense now that I'm an independant contractor. Have to pay my own health insurance too, but I can deduct that as well. :) I'm planning on going to law school next fall (hence getting a tablet instead of a 17" desktop replacement machine) and I really hate my current job (gave notice yesterday... woot!) so I took a contract position. Catch is no one ever has decent equipment, and I'll probably be doing a couple more contracts before dropping out of the workforce for a while. I figure a development grade machine bought today should still be good enough for writing papers and taking notes in 4 years, so I just went ahead & got the 4 year warranty extension.

I know you guys want specs, so here goes:
Toshiba Tecra M7 tablet
14.1" WXGA+ (1440x900) screen
Core Duo 2500 (2.0 GHz)
2GB DDR2 667MHz Ram
80GB 7200rpm HD (bums wanted another $120 for the 100GB.. grr)
NVidia Quadro NVS 110M graphics (128MB dedicated + up to 128MB shared)
DVD +/-RW
Intel 802.11 wireless... forget if it's a/b/g or just b/g
Bluetooth
 
woah, congrats, that is an awesome lappy....

I love my laptop and i'm sure you'll love yours as well... these things really are awesome
 
rayman2k2 said:
wow! that's really nice! how much does it weigh?
Click to expand...
The specs say it starts at 5.9 lbs, so probably a little over that since I added a bunch of little parts. I'm sure the 5.9 lb weight is with integrated graphics, no Bluetooth, 1 512MB memory module, etc. Of course, that's without the bag, power brick, and anything else I might carry along with it.
So it's not an ultralight or anything like that. I wasn't really too concerned about the weight- I was just trying to get the best screen I could on a tablet. Battery life isn't great either- they say "4 hours", or 7:50 with the optional "slice" battery that mounts to the bottom of the laptop. I might order the slice later if I think I'll need it when I get to school, but for what I'll be doing with it in the next year or so it just adds weight.
If I wasn't planning on going to law school in a year I probably would have just gotten a Dell w/ a 17" screen.
 
Hmm... anyone have a guess if this monstrosity I just bought might be upgradable to a Merom chip? Even if it is possible I doubt I'll upgrade it unless the lack of 64-bitness gets annoying, but I'm still curious.
 
Congratulations! I also just picked up my first laptop and my first wireless router, lol. I only spent 2k on my laptop, but it's (already has) going to serve as a replacement for my desktop.
 
I still need to pick up a wireless access point of some sort. Catch is I need one that either isn't a router or can have the router function disabled (preferably the latter... flexibility is good unless it's noticeably more expensive) and just act as a bridge. I currently use a Linux machine as a router and don't want to change that.
 
yes, its upgradeable to merom. This one guy on NBF (notebookforums) put a merom T2700 i think its called into an M90. The M90 has the 2.0 ghz core duo and he replaced it with the merom. Because the M90 and the tablet you got, well any any laptop with core duo, have the same socket and features. So it should fit
 
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