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By David Field
Feb 5, 2008

Sometime last week while up in Brisbane for the Big Day Out, I got to play the new laptop game.

Well, it was technically Voney who was playing, but I did get to sift through the well-spec’d laptops and laugh at the rubbish ones that were on display at JB Hi-Fi. And in the end, isn’t that where all the fun is?

Well, okay, that’s not where the fun is. The fun is the smell of shiny new toys mixed with the feeling of narrowly avoiding financial insolvency.

We were shopping for a laptop because as we arrived in Brisbane, Voney took his first step out of the car and his G3 iBook dove into the asphalt after it spotted a gap in the bag it was being carried in. After a short moment of mourning, we wished in retrospect that it had been named after an Italian soccer player. It became flaky, and gave us ten minute windows to get online before the hardware took a dive.

There was also another reason for playing the new laptop game: the hideous realisation that dial-up internet is still alive and well and is making Australians everywhere miserable. Listen up Kevin and your version of Peter Costello: if you start spending more money on communications infrastructure you’ll wind up having to spend less on depression awareness initiatives. Especially in remote areas.

Perhaps, with a new laptop, we could 'borrow' some internet from somebody else’s connection using its built-in, new-fangled, long-range wireless card?

Armed with these one and a half flimsy excuses, we hit JB Hi-Fi after a detour to an internet cafe to deepen the irony.

Now, we all know that computer hardware dates like the “fresh” chicken you get at your local IGA. It goes off in the time it takes to walk back to my place, and destroys that nice meal I had planned, leaving me to resort to beans and noodles with a side of off-chicken flavoured rice. So I was a little mystified that Voney chose a $1500 Asus T-bone instead on a $600 Heinz Compaq or a $500 Mi-Goreng Eee PC.

We all have outdated computer components lying around the house that we once paid big money for. There’s a gigabyte of SDRAM under my sink, for some unknown reason. Surely Voney, a man with a server, workstation, media center and Linux-running Playstation 3 could recognise that he had enough computing power already and that a cheap, lightweight laptop would serve him adequately on the road for on the road tasks like internet, typing stuff and the odd movie.

There should have been nothing wrong with a laptop so cheap that it may as well be disposable. Hell, if you spend a fraction of the cost of a behemoth on a new low end laptop every few years you’ll eventually have enough terminals for every room. Imagine being able to, when the need strikes, check the chemical composition of your washing powder from the laundry...

But he went with a reasonably powerful Asus. He wanted the power of a Core2 Duo for future unknown computing tasks; he wanted to tinker with powerful equipment; and he wanted to feel good about his new laptop.

Of course, I still thought he was wrong, until earlier this week. This original article was typed on Voney’s laptop in the car back to Sydney, but he inadvertently and (more importantly) gleefully swept away my original article from the disk as he formatted and installed XP in place of Vista Business. I resolutely refuse to forgive him for that until he rocks up randomly at my place with his new laptop to play some games and leech some stuff.

His new, powerful laptop is doubtless going to get the XGL’d Linux treatment, as well as a bottomless pit of other cool applications. And it’s this flexibility that’s made him happy with his shiny new toy -- and after some interest free trickery, the financial insolvency is Future Voney’s problem.

I, however, am stuck with a Pentium 2-based IBM Thinkpad which I'm using as a glorified mouse pad because it doesn’t work away from the mains.

And am still yet to put out a Fatwa on my local IGA.

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