Lack of laptop, nerdiness

For a "professional" (i.e. make money from) software engineer/tester, I'm not much of a nerd, which I should be. Recent tests also show I'm 18.9% of a geek, otherwise known as a nerd without any technical/useful knowledge, which I shouldn't be. A lot of my interests might not be mainstream, but I haven't really got enough practical nerd know-how because I haven't really mucked about with PCs much or game obsessively. I may be a master of finding elusive information on Google, for example, but there's about 100 easy PC things that I've never got around to doing. Subsequently, if a (barely) computer user asks me to set up their firewall, partition their hard drive or sift through the BIOS to solve a problem, it'd take a little learning. So I'm finally about to purchase my first 100%-mine computer and experience the joy first hand.

I've decided a laptop is a good idea, to give me the freedom to take it from my room to uni, to my phone line for Internet (before I set up a LAN etc at home), to the TV in the lounge or a friend's place to watch movies or basically anywhere else. It's not going to be a beast but it should be very useful for the next few years at least, when I intend to buy a desktop PC that may or may not be a beast, depending if I get into online gaming. It's unlikely to have a swish video card, but it'll still allow me to do lots more than at the moment. DivX movies and multimedia to enjoy, either on the laptop or a TV. DVD burning. Extra storage. Late night online poker games. Programming whenever I want. The centre for uni stuff. The ability to play proper PC games. More blogging/HTML tinkering. And most importantly, more speed.

No more patience-testing waits or blue screens of death on loadup like my family's neglected desktop (as they all have laptops of their own so they don't care). That antique currently sits in my parents' room, so sleep-hours use just doesn't happen. It's all the wonderful portability, accessibility and power that I'm looking forward to. I might just buy one tonight.

With $2000 as a rough target, I've had a look online first before hitting the stores. I'm pretty happy with a $1800 Dell Inspiron 6000 1.86GHz Pentium M, 1024MB RAM, 100GB HDD offering from Dell's online store. The downside is a cheap ATI Radeon X300 video card, but as I'm not intending on heavy gaming, I can let it and the slightly lacking processor slide. Memory and storage were always #1 priority for this laptop. Other avenues of investigation have proved to be less than helpful and with my laziness, I may just purchase that baby instead of doing the rounds of computer stores or swap meets. Time is money, too, you know. That's time I could spend watching all those TV series I leeched the other night. Or painting my Warhammer figurines...not! (snortle)

It's the first step of a plan to tech me up with full broadband, Foxtel+Foxtel IQ, HDTV, XBOX 360 and a sweet Wi-Fi paradise. Of course the rest of this probably won't come until I can move out, requiring some serious income and responsibility. But the wheels are in motion and I'm driving. Oh yeah.