Laptop of joy

We had popped into Best Buy last week to get a laptop. After checking out the stats and the feel of the keyboards I decided on the Gateway NV53A63U. It would have come home with us if they had any in stock. Or if they had any at the other location, or even any coming in. But it seems that they didn’t. Which makes me wonder why they still have it on display.

So I spent the week checking options and narrowing it down to my next option. I decided on the Acer AS5253-BZ611. It has 3 GB RAM and 500 GB HD, a Radeon HD6310 graphics card, a SD reader, 3 USB ports and HDMI port. So it hit all my needs. The graphics card doesn’t have any dedicated memory so I won’t be able to play all the new graphics-heavy First-Person-Shooter games – but since I don’t play those, it should be fine.

We went back to Best Buy and, even thought they didn’t have the model on display (they still had the Gateway) they did have them in stock so we purchased one. I turned down the service plan and turned down their ‘cleaning’. They also offered to charge $150 to clean out the ads and load on Nortons.
That’s okay. I spent about 6 hours starting up the Windows 7, creating my backup disks and startup disk, connecting to our network, and setting up the user profiles. I spent another 4 hours the next day installing our firewall, and loading on Diablo 2 and Hellgate. I look forward to playing them this weekend.