laptop

I also saw a report on upcoming toshiba laptops.. and the specs of the R600/A600 are certainly enticing... I'm currently looking for a replacement for my current Portege 2000 (bought in 2002) since the pccard slot is cranky which makes wifi cranky as well... also, it's a teenyweeny bit short of RAM, so I'm forced to use xfce instead of gnome, which i use on the desktop (well, i haven't tried the relatively new LXDE yet)...

When I was in HK, D brought along E's (well, I shall try not to reveal names in this blog for now I guess) eeepc, and I thought... ok... a netbook is actually not too shabby (it had way more ram than my machine, which helps)... but the main problem was the size of the keyboard... So on that trip I decided that my requirements are:

1. weight: no more than 1.12kg
2. preferably full-sized keyboard
3. battery life must be no less than 4 hrs (to read Jap notes on the plane harhar)
4. must be able to play at least a 640x480 h264 encoded movie, and hopefully a 720p one :P well, I don't need that size, but i hope to at least be able to decode the 720p real-time and scale it down if it's the video driver that slows things down.
5. should have speakers that i can at least hear in a reasonably quiet hotel room
6. should cost <>
7. should not be a MacBook Air... or perhaps I should say... should have more than 1 usb port... hopefully it also has a built-in optical drive, but that might be asking for a wee too much for the weight that i want...

the A600 looks to be ideal... yeah... maybe I should go do an M.Sc. in Math after this laptop is launched to be eligible for the student price hahaha...