Computers from Sears

We just bought a computer at Sears.

Ok, that is definitely a statement that I thought I would never say. To me, that is something akin to saying, "I just bought a car at JCPenney's." Anyway, I'll explain this part in more detail, but first some background info...

We have been limping Heimlich's laptop along for the past few months, and it finally developed an irreparable problem (as we knew it would eventually). It was bought in 2003 (right before she left to spend her second year in Austria). The three most commonly used apps on her computer are: Firefox, iTunes, and Publisher. Nothing that requires any horsepower at all. Clearly, any new computer is not only going to be fine, but an order of magnitude faster than what she was using. So, we were looking in the budget laptop segment.

The budget laptop segment actually has a lot of great computers. You can get a big screen, a reasonably large hard drive, and 2 gigs of RAM -- way more than sufficient for the tasks at hand. The problem is that most of the computers in the segment have all kinds of weird design issues.

Let's take an Acer Extensa EX5620-4020 laptop [microcenter.com] (Intel Dual-Core T2370, 2gig RAM, 250gig HDD) which you can buy for $500:


What's wrong with this picture? Well, the keyboard is "ergonomically-shaped", which means that it's going to be really hard to get used to and annoying to use.

Or, take the HP 530 laptop [tigerdirect.com] (Centrino Core Duo T2400, 1gig RAM, 160gig HDD), which is also $500:


Ok, what's wrong with this picture? The touchpad is centered on the chassis, instead of being centered on the keyboard. So, you will constantly hit the touchpad while typing.

It ends up being a constant battle to find the laptops in this segment that aren't weird or unusable. To be continued...