Marti's blog

My significant other was getting a bit annoyed at the 4 year old desktop PC she was stuck with, as it was slow (and, well, not very portable), so I decided to get her one of the new Santa-Rosa wave of laptop. There's not a lot of them out there right now but I got my eyes on the new Samsung Q45 which is already available and has pretty much all the required features : small form-factor (12" screen, less than 2 kg), decent power (1,8 Ghz Core 2 Duo with 1 Gb or RAM, new GeForce 8400 Go video card, large hard drive, etc.) and comes with Vista Home Premium. And is rather cheap at 1150 € inc. taxes (most competing models are significantly more)

The thing arrived and I can say it's everything and more than I expected : nice build quality, cool "piano black" cover (that gets fingerprints and dust all the time...), quite light to carry and very silent. Definitely an incredible good deal. My only complain is that it comes with a glossy screen, and I'm not a big fan of those, but having a mate was not an option.

As it turns out this is also my first go at Vista, and while it does look fancy I'm moderately enthusiastic about it. The new Windows Explorer feels a lot less easy to use, and crashed on me after the first 2 minutes of use (but was automatically restarted). The file layout has been overalled in a more sensible manner (My Pictures and other dedicated folders are now separate from My Documents, the whole user files are organized differently, Program Files is no more, etc.), but it takes some time getting used to it.

I also plan to upgrade my over 2 year old laptop soon but am looking forward something in the 13,3" range, and holding out for either the rumored Dell XPS m1330 or a Santa-Rosa version of the Sony SZ4. So probably nothing before at least the middle of July.