Heading to California, I figured it would be easier to have a laptop with me rather than dragging my aging desktop down that way. Best Buy had a great special on the Acer Extensa 5420, and now I’m a proud mobile user. Honestly, for personal use I don’t think desktops make as much sense as they used to. In this age of $500 laptops, being tied down to one location is quite unnecessary. Laptops offer not only the freedom of taking your work with you, but much less noise and increasingly comparable performance. Unless you’re a gamer, a laptop can fit most needs these days. A big advantage to desktops, however, is still the ability to fix and upgrade it part by part.
The Acer came with Vista Home Ultimate pre-installed, which I was prepared to give a decent try despite the horrible word of mouth. I’m quite glad I did, as after a few days of playing around with it I’m never going back to XP. Aside from the fact that Aero Glass looks stunning, a Windows power-user can tweak many things in Vista to be incredibly functional and handy. For example, you can turn on a feature that makes typing in Windows Explorer (folder view, not IE) automatically go to the search bar. And with a few tweaks, the search bar offers a real-time filtering of the displayed folder’s contents and, optionally, that of the sub-folders.
Another great time saver makes use of a key I never thought I’d use: The Windows key. Previously, if you had asked me what the most useless key on a keyboard was, this would have even beaten out runner-ups such as Scroll Lock and Pause / Break. What makes it so great now? Simple: The start menu’s search bar. Again, more like a filtering than a search, I can now launch Photoshop by simply pressing: Win - PHO - enter. Even niftier, I can type: Win - C:\Some Folder\ and see it displayed right there on the start menu. From there I can even run files or and open it in Windows Explorer. I’ll never have to use a 3rd party app like Find And Run Robot again.
Overall the Extensa has had an incredible bang for the buck. The screen is a beautiful 1280×800 wide, easily twice as bright as my aging LCD, and the system is very responsive even in power saver mode. It’s so bright and so responsive, this afternoon I accidentally had it in Power Saver (which sets brightness to 10% and limits processor power to 50%) for hours before I even noticed. It’ll get about 2.5 hours in this mode, which is fairly standard. I’ve lamented to SpaceKitty that I wish laptop battery life wasn’t so abysmal in general. I’m not sure if Acer makes a 12cell for this model or not, but I do know any replacement battery is fairly hard to come by.
