Back in the spring of 2004, when I was pregnant with my youngest son, I bought my first laptop. It was a good thing I did because a few months later I ended up on bedrest. The laptop came in very handy. It was a Dell Inspiron E1405. A nice little portable laptop with a 14.5" screen. It came pre-installed with Windows Vista, not the greatest operating system. Applications tend to crash and it runs out of memory frequently, so a regular reboot is necessary. I didn't plan on buying another laptop for a long time, but about 6 months ago, I didn't have much choice. The screen on my laptop started not staying up. It was a gradual process. At first, it would stay up if it was in a certain position and then over time it wouldn't stay up at all. I had to prop the screen up to use it. That was ok, but I got tired of not being able to sit on the couch with it, so I sucked it up and bought a new laptop.
Laptops have really come a long way in the few short years since I last bought one. They have tons of hard drive space, lots of memory and fast processors. They are really on par with desktops. I'm pretty sure I'll never buy another desktop. I have my old laptop sitting on my desk with the screen propped up serving as a secondary desktop. It's working out pretty well.
There's a lot of different laptop brands out there. It's hard to choose from all the options. Various brands include dell, gateway, sony, hp, samsung, acer, and asus laptops. I ended up going with an HP for my new laptop. I've had it about 4 months. It's really nice, very slick. The operating system is Windows 7, which is a major improvement over Windows Vista. Needing to reboot is a rare occasion and makes me very happy as I tend to have a lot of stuff open at once and find it a pain to reboot and reload everything.
Mechanically, the screen hinging seems put together much better than my old dell. The only part that took a little getting used to was the mousepad. It is all touch, no buttons. The keyboard is really nice. The keys are kind of set down into the computer more than on my dell.
I really hope my new HP holds up better than my old Dell did.
