Happy Chinese New Year

Happy New Year, it's the year of the Rooster and I'm happy the monkey (2004 was the year of the monkey) is off the back ;)

It has been a busy few days, I've bought a Averatec laptop (http://www.averatec.com/notebooks/6240series.htm) on Sunday from Compusa. The Compusa stores at Santa Clara have been very helpful. Like many of you are think, Averatec is a new name (backed by Korean company Trigem) and hence you kinda got to be worry about quality. But after going thru 3 of their laptop to find the right one, I'm happy with the purchase. Averatec has got to at the least improve their selection of an LCD screen vendor.. 3 machines I got had a dead pixel in the center region of the screen. The 4th I got had a dead pixel at the edge, so it's not as annoying. Compusa was helpful as they allowed me to exchange the machines and they have change their return policy to be a lot more Fry's like, i.e no restocking fee. So I was ok buying from them and this experience has been good and I have no issue buy from Compusa in the future.

As to the laptop, it's a interesting machine, it's built as a DVD player and a laptop. Unlike the HP DV1000 series which has a linux partition that the DV1000 boots into to do the "instant On" and play DVDs and mp3. This laptop has a separate circuit for DVD player and is truely instant on, it's like turning on the home DVD player. No waste of a linux partition, just a fully embedded DVD player using the laptop screen. This gives them the advantage of 7 hours of DVD playback on a single charge. Good innovative idea, simple and logical, something the bigger guys in the business are not doing. The other thing about the Averatec is price, for $999.99 you get a Athlon 64 Mobile with 15.4" widescreen, 512MB Ram, 60GB HDD, 802.11B/G wireless and DVD+/-RW burner, bad graphics subsystem, definitely not a gaming laptops but great for everything else. A lot for the price and what's amazinging is the thickness, it's under 1.2" thick. The bigger PC brands have adopted the American dream.. "Big as Texas", have you seen the HPs and Dells with this kind of processor, they are 2" thick.

Before you say the thickness is needed due the heat of the processor.. think again, this laptop is actually cooler running then my old Omnibook 6000 (P3 800MHZ). I stress the CPU with virus scan running and playing DVD at the same time, cpu usuage is around at 65%-80% (lots of zip files on the drive that requires extra CPU to unzip and then scan). So fatter machine only means it's cheaper to make, don't have to design properly, just throw everything in as the case is big enough to hold it all.

Happy Chinese New Year!!!