Friday May 2
14:28
Retail Therapy
I bought some computer goodies yesterday.
First was a new laptop: Acer Aspire 5520 AS5520-7A1G16.
Second was new memory (2GB) for said laptop, raising the specs to:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 (Dual Core) 1.9GHz
3GB Memory
160GB HDD
DVD burner
15.4″ screen
This isn’t a “power laptop” - I don’t play games - but for the price I think it’s amazing value: 69200 yen, about 665 USD, for a dual-core machine with 3GB memory. I paid nearly 3 times that for my Intel 2GHz Dual Core / 2GB laptop 2 years ago.
The reason for buying it at first was to replace the little Kohjinsha SA1 that sits beside me at work, to surf the internet, check email, etc. The Kohjinsha is great for travel, but using it with logmein to connect to my home PC is a pain: 800×600 screen trying to display a 1280×800 screen - not nice.
However, I’m going to benchmark it against my machine at home first. If there’s little difference (Intel Dual Core 2GHz, 2GB memory), I’m going to use the new machine at home. Not only will I appreciate the larger screen for viewing photos, but I’ll be able to get all my iTunes on the internal drive. My current home machine is also smaller, so it will fit better on my desk at work. In honesty, I want a nice desktop machines with multiple monitors at home - but I’m trying to resist that, because I don’t want to have yet more junk to carry from country to country. If this machine performs well, it’ll make it easier to resist splashing out :)
Speaking of small: Third purchase - new memory for my little Kohjinsha SA1.
I had no idea memory prices were so cheap these days.The 2GB for the Acer was just 4400 yen, about 40USD - that’s nothing.
My SA1 has been struggling running XP with 512MB and its little 500MHz AMD Geode chip. While looking for the Acer memory, I just happened to search for memory for the SA1 out of interest. If I’d known I could have upped the memory to 1GB for just 6000 yen, I’d have done it months ago. I’ll never get over the limitations of the processor - but for the price of 6 pints of beer, XP can now breathe.
The Acer hasn’t arrived yet - they will deliver it on Sunday. It comes with Japanese Home Vista Premium, so my first task, after slotting in the extra memory, will be either installing XP or an English version of Vista.
Links:
Acer Aspire 5520 AS5520-7A1G16 laptop (with 1GB memory): biccamera.com. Price is 64,800yen until the end of this weekend.
This laptop is not available in the shops, so with the help of Google Translate, I had to buy it online. What astounded me is that even though the website is Japanese only, when I phoned them up to confirm the delivery date after buying, I was able to talk with a guy who speaks fluent English. And they’re delivering on a Sunday. Cool.
Memory: Ark in Akihabara, found from Kakaku.com price matching site.
Kakaku is a brilliant site - I check the price of everything electronic there before I buy.
Ark is a shop that I didn’t know about before, though I knew the street it’s in. As well as very cheap prices on memory, I noticed they also have 4GB SDHC cards for 1,770 Yen - that’s almost giving them away!
