Personal Case Study: Upgrading to a better device Part 1

Category: Tech Today

People who have disposable income are very fortunate when it comes to electronic devices. They can buy a smartphone and replace it next month if they wanted (or buy two or three more). I'm often amazed at how callous people are when it comes to their electronics and their buying habits. I often read about people who keep their netbooks in some cabinet somewhere and ignore it completely after they've had their hands on an iPad. If you have a netbook at home left unused, please ship it to me and I'll give it to a few underprivileged kids and teach them Ubuntu, HTML5 and photo editing.

I try to squeeze as much productivity from my machines and devices before upgrading to a new one. One of my greatest technical regrets is that I spent several years obsessing about inkjet and laser printers though I didn't use them as much as I should have.  For other types of devices, however, I assess the value and durability of my old device and my own current needs carefully before shelling out money for an upgrade. 

Case #1: Acer Aspire 5500Z to Lenovo Ideapad Z360

Category: Thin and Light portable

Predecessor: Acer may not have a stellar brand reputation back in early 2004, but when I purchased the Acer Aspire 5500Z in 2005, it exceeded all my expectations, from watching Humphrey Bogart's The Maltese Falcon (1941) during a power outage to running all of the Linux distributions I was testing at the time. 

Upgrade: It took me months of studying the hardware specifications and scraping cash to purchase the Aspire's successor - an Ideapad Z360 Core i3 with an Nvidia Optimus discrete graphics card. Like the Aspire when I first purchased it, there are many imperfections to the budget Ideapad Z360 (which includes poor heat management and horrible battery life). As a non-gamer, the 1GB discrete graphics was wasted on my mundane XML, Office and Adobe applications. The Ideapad was also not nearly as friendly with Linux distributions such as Fedora and openSUSE as the Aspire was. That said, the Z360 is a great workstation for getting real work done and is powerful enough to function as a server.

Performance Difference: Around 50%. The Z360 is great for Windows 7 and recent releases of Lubuntu, openSUSE and Fedora. Although you need to keep the Ideapad plugged in, the 13.3 inch screen and hardware is more than capable of playing Blu-Ray and DVD rips of old movies like The Rocketeer (1991) and The Shadow (1994).

Current Usage: The Aspire, despite its age, cracked vents, and legacy components (it has a PCMCIA card slot), still boasts the best keyboard I've ever used and is still around. The Aspire 5500Z is currently running Manjaro Linux and is in use as a sandbox and testing environment. The Z360, on the other hand, is still my primary Windows 7 machine, handling Microsoft Office, Adobe and iTunes tasks.

Future upgrade: In the far-flung future when I'm as wealthy as Tony Stark, I'll probably finally buy a Macbook Pro.

Continued in Personal Case Study: Upgrading to a better device Part 2