The Pizzazzy

After a $2000 holiday to Phuket, I indulged myself in another extravagant purchase. It was the COMEX fair in Singapore, City Hall. Since I was fed up of my three years old HP Compaq, which started taking ages to boot and giving a bad performance even under basic home usage and above all made lots of noise after every few minutes oooossshhhhh… oooossssshhhhh and my lap would start practically burning from the heat it generated.

The COMEX fair happens every three months or so. But I wasn’t sure that before the next one my laptop will not break down finally. I dragged Anand along. That Saturday we checked out all the stalls. The very first one was Apple. iMac was really impressive, but then I was looking for a laptop right, so I also checked out Macbooks. Since I wasn’t too sure that I would like to shift to Mac OS completely, we looked around further for other deals.

Next was Lenovo stall. I was really impressed by Thinkpad, but since Anand was insisting I went along with him for other brands like Dell, Fujitsu, Toshiba. I guess my mind was made up and it was stuck on the Thinkpad T61.

After a lot of stall hopping we left the COMEX for the day with a bag full of pamphlets with a plan to return the next day. The whole of Sunday morning went into checking out the COMEX deals over the net and comparing the features and reading reviews of the laptops that had made an entry into the final list. Now the competition was between Thinkpad and Dell. Anand was for Dell which was coming to $2100 and I was for Thinkpad which was coming to $2600.

By afternoon we went to the fair once again. After a good lunch in the Food Republic we once again checked out first Dell and then Thinkpad.

The Lenovo sales guy was happy to see us back and remembered us from the previous day. Since I was seriously considering whether to save $500 in the difference by buying Dell or go for the very professional and sleek Thinkpad, the sales guy started offering some freebies (the usual at such Fairs) as he didn’t want to lose a sale on the last day of the fair. I was also driving a hard bargain trying to make up the difference of $500 by getting more of them.

During this whole episode between the sales guy and myself the only person who was dead sure that I had made up my mind was Anand. So, he assuringly patted the sales guy and told him “Don’t worry man you’ve already got a deal. I know my wife”. That was when the sales guy stopped his sales pitch.

And finally we took home the Thinkpad T61 along with a Sonic Gear Speakers, an 80GB hard disk, an optical mouse, a good case and also a free upgrade to 2 GB RAM. Let me quickly run through the configuration : 2GHz speed, 2GB RAM, 120 GB Memory, Intel Centrino Dual processor, 14.1 inches wide screen, weighing around 2 kgs etc etc.

Now that I have got everything in place from my old laptop to this and have finished organising everything, it quietly sits on my lap even after hours of running while I am trying to do everything at once. And the most impressive feature is that it can keep its cool and only becomes slightly warm after a few hours. YES, this is one proud owner of a Thinkpad signing off. Adios till the next post.