Oh Moore's Law. You might be running out of steam, but you still deliver.

As you know, because I have been whining about it constantly on this site, my old trusty laptop has been killing power cords in a particularly brutal fashion. I've been looking for a replacement, and have been forced to use an HP Mini 1000 Netbook in its place. This experience inspired the latest run of comics.

When I bought the old laptop I dropped about $1600 on it. It's a few years old but it still runs everything quite well. I assumed that I'd have to spend something similar in order to replace it.

I was, as it turns out, wrong. This weekend I found a more than serviceable replacement for $700.

Behold my new laptop.

It is superior to my old laptop in nearly every way: better graphics processor, i5 Dual-core processor, RAM expandible to 8GB, space for two hard drives instead of one, more external connectors. The only deficit is in screen resolution. My old laptop had 1680x1080 resolution, this one can only manage 1600x900. The change in resolution is noticeable but not maddeningly so.

It's a relief to type on a full-sized keyboard again (though the keyboard layout is slightly different from my old computer, so there is still some adjustment there). It's not quite ready for full-time use yet, because it doesn't have Linux on it yet (I'm going keep Windows on the first drive and put Linux on the second drive because I anticipate having Windows available will be useful for work) but I have Inkscape and Gimp on Windows and can start publishing comics normally again.

I bought it at Sam's Club, which means it's a consumer-grade laptop, not a high-end, gaming laptop, yet it outclasses my old laptop, which at the time was a high-end, gaming laptop.

Insanity. Convenient for me, though.