Friday, December 23rd, 2016

	Quest for home notebook
	~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ever since we moved from our tiny flat in Prague to somewhat bigger
in Lysa nad Labem, I was looking for a comfortable notebook computer
to be used on the sofa in the living room. As there were and still
are other priorities, my computer table is only temporary, located
in a room, that will be hopefully in 2017 converted to room for our
son. At the moment it's still full of boxes and my computer stuff,
so I just prefer to spend evenings in the living room.

As I gave my T400 to my wife, I was stuck with a 10" Acer netbook,
which is great for note-taking or Perl programming in the train,
but far from comfortable for home use. Tiny screen is good neither
for my eyes nor for my spine. So I've got the idea of getting 
something with at least 14" screen and horizontal resolution of
1400 pixels, which should provide sufficient space for anything and
even be ergonomic. Of course the cheaper the better.

First machine I've got, was a HP Compaq nc6320 - a great notebook
with a CPU powerful just enough, a 4:3 display (1400x1050) and all
the good old ports (LPT, COM) as well as the new ones (USB). The
only problem was, that across the screen there were multiple vertical
malfunctioning lines. I dismantled the computer to find whether the
problem is in the cable or the LCD, but found nothing - the LCD
seems to be OK, moving the cable didn't change a thing as well.

Second machine I tried, was a Acer TravelMate 291LCi. It has a way
slower CPU, less memory and even some bad pixels on the display, but
all that was less annoying than the bad lines on nc6320. On the other
hand it has even more ports (all above mentioned + FireWire & IrDA)
and the same screen resolution, so it's quite a versatile machine.
I ordered a faster CPU (on eBay, 7USD) and was in search of bigger
memory modules...

...and then the third machine happened: HP EliteBook 6930p. It's 
most modern of the three, doesn't have any of the old ports and I had
to pay for it - the first two were free. But 35 euro is quite a low
amount of money for machine of the same speed my T400 had and with
1400x900 LED-backlit display with no apparent flaws. At the moment
there is Windows Vista installed, which is really pain. Soon I will
however replace the HDD with a 120GB SSD and Vista with Slackware,
so this will probably be my "big" notebook for the next years.

I had T400 for two years and I hope, that EliteBook 6930p will serve
me at least that long. Don't expect another such quest sooner
than in 2019.