I’ve been busy as fook. The other half came off a ladder and broke his leg in two places so after one pretty big op he is now at home in a plaster unable to walk so i’m having to do everything. Bugger all time for blogging, facebooking, world of warcrafting – it’s torture i tell you TORTURE! :-) Nice having him at home though.

By the way, about the Apple event yesterday. I can’t decide if that new Nano is fecking lovely or fecking ugly! I think it’s a bit of both. But i kinda want an orange one. Tut. I’ll be needing a new music player soon and the only reason i stick with apple is because i love itunes and it’s so easy to organise.

Still researching a new laptop. Alienware M11x is perfect on paper but in reality it’s a bag of shit thanks to Dell and their horrendous quality control (or lack of), build quality issues (hinges breaking and the screen falling off) and having to spend £300 for a extended warranty because it’s pretty much a sure thing your screen is going to keep breaking. (So what happens when your warranty runs out)? No thanks. I’m getting a Sony Vaio. Higher specced, better built and cheaper!

I’m going to treat myself to a new laptop towards the end of the year so i’ve started researching them. What i’m looking for is something powerful enough to run the latest games but portable enough to sit on my knee. So the absolute maximum would be 15″ but i’d prefer 12 to 14″. Oh and it will need a backlit keyboard so i can type in bed with the lights dimmed! :-)

The first one that fits the bill is Alienware m11x. A beast of a laptop but after viewing the forums there seems to be a few quality control issues with them, most commonly a hinge that breaks off and the screen getting scratched from hitting the keyboard. It shouldn’t surprise me, i’ve had laptops from Dell before (they took over Alienware) and two of those were returned because of shoddyness.

The second one that fits the bill is Sony Vaio Z. Spec and size wise it is perfect and it looks extremely well built. And far nicer looking that the alienware. Trouble is it costs a frigging fortune! I’m not sure i’m up for spending 2 grand or over on a laptop.

Others that i’ve seen mentioned are MSI and Acer but they’re not really what i’m looking for. Either too big or lack of features i’m looking for. It’s surprising what little choice there is for a powerful ultra portable. I can’t find any 13″ laptops. I know Dell (yea i know) used to do an XPS 13″. I suppose there’s always a macbook but i don’t know how it will work with games.

ARGHHHH!

Well not much time for blogging lately with all the house maintenance going on but I did manage to squeeze in a couple of computer upgrades (yay!). Me and t’other half had matching 12″ laptops. We’ve already got two 17″ Dell ones but wanted something more portable as well for carrying around. So we got two packard bell BG45 U300 laptops. We did look at netbooks but found the keyboards were too small so went for these instead.

And I have to say they have been brilliant so far. Very well built but the only thing letting them down was RAM (they only had 1GB) so over the weekend I upgraded them both to 3GB and the difference it has made is unreal! I’m thinking about possibly upgrading the 80GB hard drive to a 120GB solid state drive to make it even faster. It would work out much cheaper than buying a superfast ultraportable and to be honest i’m really attached to this little PB. Watch this space ….

I packed away my main laptop last night because of redecorating so i’m using my little black laptop now on my knee, anyway last night it updated itself to Vista service pack 2 and since then it knocked out the frigging wifi! This happened to me before on my other laptop, upgraded vista and it knocked out wifi connection. I cannot wait to get a MAC!