This weekend I finally bought my personal laptop. I was originally thinking to hold off a purchase till I get a passing grade for my second class – Financial Accounting. But with the homework requirement in my Judgment, Uncertainty and Decisions (JUD) class to use not just Excel, but also a special proprietary add-in for statistics that came with a textbook and licensed for two years, I decided that I would go ahead and get a laptop.
Besides, there have been getting more conflicts of time over computer usage. It would also be better to have all my Business School files kept in one principal place, so I would not get confused about the versions of documents I have, and I am working on for my MBA classes. Also I don’t really have much time to go shopping for pretty much anything. So since I had time that day I put it to good use.
There were four finalists on my list of potential laptops that I compiled on my visit to Best Buy a week before. I did not really add much online research this time. I knew that all the computers I selected were reasonably good in quality, performance, and reliability. They all had the features I deemed necessary or desirable. So the only thing was to sleep on it, for a week 
, and then just choose the one based on visual, tactile, and other subjective factors – just to see which one would appeal to me in the store.
By the way, one laptop which specifically brought me to the store a week before was discarded from the list altogether: Toshiba, Model: A505-S6980. Toshiba is a very trusted brand for laptops. I liked what I read about it online in terms of features and specifications: it was really beefed up, with 16’ monitor, but once I took it in my hands I realized that it was really too heavy and too big for me to carry around to Business School and back.
The biggest turn off for me personally was the battery sticking out from the bottom of the laptop. It’s probably a cool thing if you just use it around the house as your primary computer instead of a desktop. The battery would give you a slight tilt for better viewing too. But to carry that monster out of house would be no joke for me. It would probably hardly fit into my computer bag anyways.
So the short list of possible laptops was as follows:
- Toshiba E105-S1802
- Sony VGN-NW240F
- Sony VGN-NW270F
- ASUS U50a-RBBML05
I went around these models again: looking at them, touching them, testing the keyboard, weighing them in my hand, just short of smelling and tasting.
Just in case not to miss on anything worth considering, I asked the sales person to show me other brands that would be comparable to the laptops on my shortlist in specs and features.
I also solicited my older daughter’s opinion on which one from the given models she would prefer should she be choosing a laptop for herself.
First went down ASUS. Nothing personal – just the wrong color in my daughter’s opinion. It was branded Merlot – some kind of burgundish to my eye.
Toshiba went down second. It was probably the coolest of them all: with fingerprint reader, 500 GB hard drive, Bluetooth. It was also the most expensive on my list -$850. The price and 14’ display knocked it down from the list. If I were extensively travelling with the laptop, I would most likely get this one.
But in my quantitative MBA classes I realized that having to work with spreadsheets all the time is much easier if you have bigger screen – you don’t have to do as much horizontal scrolling, and you hope to be able to see all data in columns at once without scrolling . This was actually the reason I had been considering 17’monitors in the first place.
So as for Toshiba, I thought that 14’ display was too much of a tradeoff for my intended use of the laptop given the price.
Then I had two laptops from Sony left on my list. They were very similar in most of their features. But one – Sony VGN-NW240F – had 500 GB hard drive and was a bit cheaper. The other – Sony VGN-NW270F – had ‘only’ 320 GB hard drive, but it had Blue Ray disk support.
It was kind of a tough call for me. Because the one with 500 GB hard drive (which I thought is a good thing to have in the long run) was also $50 less expensive.
Eventually I leaned to the one with the Blue Ray. I don’t have Blue Ray player at home, so if occasionally I will have a Blue Ray disk, I thought it would be good to be able to watch it on the big screen TV from my laptop.
One interesting observation on what had indirect or subliminal influence on my final decision. In the store together with us there was a couple who were also selecting a laptop. By the time I zoomed on the last two Sonys on my list, they were already at the Sony laptop area deliberating on what particular model to choose. At some point they seemed to get inclined to the one with Blue Ray over the other two Sony models. I think they did not have a Blue Ray player at home either, and that was a compelling feature for them. At any rate, this served as some sort of reinforcement and validation to me and I finally decided on the Sony VGN-NW270F.
By the way, the guy in that couple was wearing a sweater with Georgetown McDonough School of Business insignia. Naturally, I asked him about that. He turned out to be a 3-rd year part-time MBA student at Georgetown University. So we chatted a little about it. It was interesting for me to learn some first-hand stuff from a fellow MBA-er.
To cap it all, I am now a satisfied owner of a new laptop – Sony VGN-NW270F. I like it very much, especially the Windows 7 installed on it. I really love this new operating system. But this is a topic for a whole new post, which I hope I will be able to do one day.
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