Still pondering that laptop thing — in response to yesterday’s post, someone pointed me to the Acer TravelMate 8204WLMi, which I had actually already seen in a review. I had not given it any further attention, partly because the review wasn’t completely positive, but now I find that this must have been about the only reviewer who found really interesting flaws in that laptop.
Turns out this is a really nice machine, with a lot more modern hardware inside than the T60, and it costs less. It’ll even take 4GB RAM, which I like a lot, although I’m not yet sure whether I’ll be able to actually get it expanded to full capacity. One of the biggest drawbacks for me, believe it or not, is the fact that they don’t have a trackpoint in that thing… I love trackpoints and I’ve never had a laptop that didn’t have one — these touchpad things have never been able to completely convince me so far, although the additional features with scroll areas and similar things are certainly very nice. Another thing I’m not sure about is the keyboard. Not the fact that it’s curved, but rather doubts about the general quality of laptop keyboards. I hear that the Acer has a pretty good one and in case I decide to go with it I hope that’s true, because I assume that even a very good laptop keyboard is still quite far from an average desktop keyboard. Well, I’ll give it some more thought…