Laptop - Hunter : Part 1 - Do I need Windows?

Its been a couple of weeks now, and my 4 year old PC is starting to give up on me. I need an upgrade and, since I am at the clichéd "crossroad" of my life, it makes sense to buy a laptop - at last. Buying a laptop is a big deal.

Agreed I have been a Computer Science student for quite some time now, but I never really kept abreast of all the latest news from the computer market about prices etc. So its been a good experience learning about how things stand in the laptop market.

Since I am not counting on Windows for anything else except gaming, I don't really need to worry too much about the new Windows 7 which is said to be released fully by December this year.

I was not really interested in the netbook idea as it was going to be my substitute for a proper PC. What I was looking for was a system with

• 4GB RAM
  
• Good 2GHz + processor, Intel preferred
  
• Graphics card if its not too expensive
• not more than 3Kg weight.
  

Here's a short round-up of my findings on the roam online from an Indian base. I guess there are better deals to be had and more to found on the road but then this really is the first stop for me.

My first stop was Acer. I have to say it was a very poor advertisement for a product. Agreed they don't have an online store solution, but it is so unfriendly and even incomplete! eg. the most important part of the online search would be the prices. Here's what their "pricelist" page looked like. So as a result, sadly, I can't really say anything about their laptops or prices. I wouldn't mind taking a look around Palarivattom where there is an Acer store and asking for the prices, but I have to say I am a bit turned off.

Now, in a bid to check out some of the less popular brands, I took a glance at the HCL L(e)aptops. (Hey they are Indian after all!). The HCL Leaptop T39 seems like an amazing laptop for its price. I was mighty impressed with this one. Its loaded with Ubuntu 8.10 default and that obviously brings the price down.

The question is whether Windows is needed for anything?

I believe that Microsoft has done only 1 bit of software well and that is MS Office. Office is so good that it was the only MS software on Mac that people really appretiated. None of the other competitors (not even Apple) have been able to better it.

Another part of their ever so small arsenal of reasons-to-use-MS would be ASP.net. There are some reviews online which say that the Linux environment Mono is not without its issues.

Oh well all these issues for another day then!