The £12 laptop with the solid state disk

Friday, June 4th, 2010

The more seductive the toys they put in front of me, the more devious I get at strategies to avoid their siren call. Flying in and out of Zurich airport, I developed the Red Watch Excuse: I only buy watches with red faces, which are very rare, therefore I can merrily ignore all the very sexy, very expensive watches with non-red faces.

I wrote here about upgrading my old (and horribly unreliable, until it was repaired) MacBook Pro laptop with a solid-state drive: this was another Red Watch trick, to stop me looking at other, later, sexier MacBooks. Now, I’m carrying an HP nc4400, because it’s small enough that I can ignore pretty piano-black netbooks, and it runs Vista, which hasn’t done anything nasty to me yet and helps me to avoid buying one copy of Windows 7 per laptop… You begin to see the pattern here.

So when the iPad seemed imminent, I went back to my basic principles. I had already rescued my oldest laptop with a Compact Flash disk upgrade, after being obliged to fall back on it because it has a genuine, no-messing 9-pin serial port. Lots of switches and routers use a serial connection as part of the “I’m a brick, fix me” mode they occasionally enter: so replacing the 13GB rotating iron platter drive (c. 1997) with an 8GB solid state Compact Flash made perfect sense. However, for blog purposes this job is low on good evidence, because Tecra 8000’s put their disks inside dent-prone alloy carrier shells, so you can’t easily see what I was up to.

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Toshiba Tecra A11 and Tecra M11: first-look reviews

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

Toshiba splits its laptop branding into two main streams: Satellite and Satellite Pro for home and small business; Tecra for larger businesses. And we got our hands on the two new Tecra models at its 2010 press event: the 14in Tecra M11 and 15.4in Tecra A11.

As can be seen from the photo above, there’s a certain amount of similarity between them (the A11 is on the left, the M11 on the right). They’re black, they’re a little boxy, and they eschew such consumer fripperies as isolated keyboards and, in the M11’s case, a webcam.

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