New year, new laptop - Samsung NC10

Near the middle of December I lost a very dear, and constant, companion - my Sony Vaio ‘some model number or other’. After nearly five years the laptop stopped charging and it wasn’t worth paying for the repairs. I put off getting a replacement for as long as I could but while I had the work laptop as a standby I needed a machine I could treat as my own. Something outside the company security policy. Something I could install lots of applications and languages I’ll only ever look at once on. So I bit the bullet and bought myself a Samsung NC10.

It’s not exactly been a long time since I bought it so I’ve hardly stressed the machine too but first impressions are very favourable. Battery life on wireless is a good four-six hours (depending on what else I’m doing). The keyboard is much nicer than the Asus ePC I used for about ten minutes before cramping my hands up and the screens actually very usable. It’ll never replace a dual monitor setup but it’s fine for writing little scripts, web browsing and reading my email.

I’ve got a 1GB memory upgrade on order (it can only take 2GB) and then I’ll see if I can make VMWare play nice without killing the battery.