Stormy weather and your business....

[Dien Rice]

Originally Posted by Sandi Bowman

I wondered about laptops for continuous use since they seem so limited in capacity...how do they work for every day, literally all day sometimes, use? What about plugging in peripherals like external hard drives and printers...any limitations?

I've asked others but get conflicting answers. I trust your judgement so would value your input highly.

Hi Sandi,

Ankesh already gave an excellent reply! So here are a few more comments...

I've been using laptops of one sort or another I'm not sure how long - certainly for more than 10 years. However, I've always had a "desktop" computer too, until around halfway through last year or so...

I haven't found any trouble using a laptop. I think you can do almost anything with a laptop nowadays that you can do with a desktop. The main limitation, I think, would be for heavy "gamers" - people who want advanced graphics capabilities so they can play the most graphics-intensive games around! For me that's not an issue...

Until October last year, I was using a Toshiba Satellite laptop which I had bought in January, 2003. You could plug in anything you wanted - it had a parallel port for the printer, and so on...

In October last year, I bought a MacBook, and as well as running the Mac operating system (Mac OS X), I also installed Windows XP, so I can run either one. The main issue with peripherals with a MacBook is it only has USB ports. However, I think you can get adaptors so you can plug most things into USB ports nowadays...

Over time, I've owned probably around 6 or 7 laptops. Some of them (my early ones) were bought second-hand, while others (my more recent ones) were bought new. One issue I have always had is with the screen dying! That happened to my Toshiba I mentioned earlier, and also happened with other laptops I've owned (Compaq, Dell). You can still plug in an external monitor, though, so even if the screen dies you can still use it if you get an external monitor. You can also get the screen fixed, but in my experience even a fixed screen still "dies" again later on...

Personally, though, I still love laptops. I think I really like the portability, which is of course what they're there for!

I agree with what Ankesh says about hard drive size and RAM. Having very little RAM can really slow down your computer. (My current MacBook has 1 Gigabyte of RAM, and an 80 Gigabyte hard drive.)

I hope that helps...

- Dien