BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

There are couple of gadgets that I possess that make great conversation pieces. One is Lenovo X61p laptop, which I reviewed earlier, another one is famous HTC Advantage 7501. Both, as it turns out, attract a lot of curiosity.

When I am working (or blogging) at the local Starbucks with my X61 a lot of people pay attention to the small yet strong laptop figure. Most of people I see around me use large, bulky, flashy laptop, like Dell, Toshiba or Apple, with 15 and 17 inch screens. X61p that I own has only 12.1 inches and resolution of 1024×768. However, it doesn’t look like cheap plastic hardware, more like a business tool for a person on the go. It also attracts looks because it’s different from other laptops around, so it naturally stands out. And any conversation it starts can be turned into potential sales pitch. After all - it isn’t hard to predict the sequence: “Nice laptop you got there! - Thank you, I travel a lot, so I have to have as light load as possible. - Oh, wow, what do you do? - Web design, we create web sites. Our customers are all over US, so I get to travel a lot sometimes.” - and so on.

The HTC Advantage (follow this link if you want to see where I bought it and don’t fall for any price above a grand) is very unique. It doesn’t look like Amazon’s Kindle (another great conversation piece, actually), but I do read books on a subway using HTC Advantage, so people become naturally interested. Again, the sequence is very much the same. Although last time I got asked, the lady pulled out her Blackberry and started researching Amazon for HTC Advantage right there and then.

Generally speaking there is a lot of stereotype bashing going on right here. Being equipped with so many advanced gadgets makes me look like a geek. On the other hand, these gadgets help me make more contacts with people I would otherwise miss. Not a geeky behavior at all.

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Got myself a brand new blogging workstation, thanks to a very good deal on Lenovo’s web site. The screen is as small as I could get (12.1″ with 1024×768 screen resolution), the whole thing is so light I almost forgot I am holding something while was carrying it between rooms at home.

The unit I ordered came with 2GB memory and large 8-cell battery that, as Windows Vista Home Basic shows, should last for as long as 6 hours. Of course that Vista thingy will be the first to go, since I don’t really have a need for latest and greatest in such a small laptop. Perhaps Ubuntu or trusty old Windows XP (given that Service Pack 3 is almost upon us) would do much better.

The reason for purchase was (again!) my recent trip to Chicago. I had a dozen things to do, but hesitated given the size of my primary workhorse laptop (15″ 1600×1200 IBM ThinkPad T60p). X61s, however, is much more convenient in this sense and (aside from taking a lot less space and weighting a lot less) has much better battery life.

The only thing that is truly missing is the Ultrabay Slim extension bay, so if I would want to watch movies on the road, my best bet would be to rip them to hard drive.

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Finally my brand new toy has arrived and I am spending enormous amount of time on moving stuff from two old 60GB hard drives to one new shiny 100GB drive. So far the system looks much better with 1600×1200 native screen resolution and Intel® Core Duo processor T2700 (2.33GHz) plus 2GB of RAM.

By the way, speaking of RAM. Laptop refused to hibernate, giving me a “Insufficient System Resources Exist to Complete the API” error. Being a geek myself I immediately (as time permitted, ofcourse) googled the problem. One of the first results was this post that answered my question quickly and easily. It turned out that due to large amount of RAM installed (2GB) Windows kernel was unable to allocate enough resources to hibernate. Read it and weep.

After patching system seem to hibernate normally. 3:20am, I can go to hibernate myself for four hours. Finally.

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