Laptop died...

My 3year-old-going-4-this-coming-Apr Fujitsu laptop decided to die on me suddenly yesterday.. when I was looking around to get a new laptop..

That old Fujitsu has its monitor burnt some time early this year.. and on my birthday, a lightning stuck and the LAN card was fried.. so it was just a matter of time before I get a new laptop.. and I can't wait to get a laptop that I don't have to decipher what it was trying to tell.. the old Fujitsu came with Vista (the "new" OS at that time) which I was totally unfamiliar with and it was in Japanese! I didn't do much customization as I was too lazy to read through all the katagana options.. (ｺﾝﾄﾛｰ ﾊﾟﾅﾙ､ｼｽﾃﾝ､ｽﾀｰﾄ) thus I didn't really fully utilize what Vista has to offer..

I asked around for suggestions. Never one who believed in branded goods, I had narrowed down my options to Acer, Asus or Dell. I would never consider Apple (still like my Windows and my translation jobs specifically need Excel), Sony (looks nice but darn bloody expensive), HP (just don't like it) or Lenovo (same reason as HP). Also, all these brands are at least MYR200-500 more expensive than the 3 I mentioned earlier. My personal take is that if you are unlucky, even a branded laptop/PC will not guarantee a problem-less "existence".

In the end, I decided to get an Acer, Acer Aspire 4738G which comes with a price-tag of MYR$2299 (around USD$750). It has an Intel Core i5-460M processor, 4 GB RAM, 500 GB HDD, 14" HD monitor, Win 7 Home Edition (64-bit) and comes with a 3-year local warranty. It satisfied all my requirements except for the warranty part. I will be (must be positive, so I am using an affirmative verb.. :p) leaving this country next year, so I would have preferred an international warranty. Well, I can't have everything..

Next on my to-buy list will be MS Office.. If it wasn't for one of the translation jobs, I would be happy using the free OpenOffice software. Anyway, it is all an investment, since these translation jobs are my source of income for months to come.

The only bad thing is that I didn't manage to get the data that was still in my old Fujitsu out in time as it died on me without any warning. My only hope is to see if I could access the HDD using an external (SATA) HDD casing. There are still some important files which I've created/used during the past 1 year that I would want them back quite badly. Mmmm.. maybe I should get an external HDD to serve as my backup from now onwards, since HDD is getting cheaper by the days..

Okay, I need to go back to my new toy now.. :) Need to customize it and then install all the anti-"something" software... So far, Windows 7 seemed pretty user-friendly.. :p