It’s traditional around these parts that I write a post whenever I get to welcome a new computer into the family. In July of 2002 it was Dr. Evil, more a brick than a laptop, in May of 2004 it was my beloved 14″ HP NC6000 laptop, in July of 2006 I met my 15.4″ HP NC8430 (employer-supplied, thank you employer!), which in turn led to this Ubuntu-critical blog post of mine that attracted 50000 (yes, fifty thousand) readers over 2 days, in July of 2008 I splurged on a lovely quad core desktop machine, in September of 2009 I acquired an Asus 1005HA-H netbook, and in November of 2010 my employer got me a super-strong Dell Latitude E6410 laptop.
Today I welcomed the latest and probably prettiest laptop so far into the family: Pretty Samsung NP300V3A-S01NL laptop!
Behold the Samsung NP300V3A-S01NL (Series 3). It has an absolutely gorgeous-to-type-on chiclet keyboard, a 13.3″ matte (!) display, NVIDIA GT520m graphics with Optimus, second-gen Core i5 2410m, 4G RAM and 500G disc, all for a terribly reasonable price, which is important, as this one is not employer-bought. A man needs a laptop like this for his top-secret personal biznizz, yes?
It’s running Windows Home Premium, so I have to use Truecrypt instead of EFS for encrypting my biznizz, which is stored mostly in my Dropbox pro account. The battery life is quite impressive probably due in part to Optimus switching. The drawback of this is that I probably won’t be putting Linux on here anytime soon. These days you can use both the graphics adapters in Linux, but both of them stay active all the time, so it kills the battery really quickly.
We learn at least two more things from this post:
- I do seem to exhibit a certain obsessive compulsive behaviour when it comes to keeping track of the arrival dates of the various computers in my life.
- When spring comes around, hide my credit card.
Update on May 2, 2012: I have just eaten my hat. Ubuntu Linux 12.04 with Bumblebee runs just wonderfully on this laptop. Read all about it in my VXLabs blog post.