This week saw the arrival of 3 new gadgets to my clutches.  A laptop (works really hence the ‘mostly’), my new iPod nano (after much deliberation as to which to buy) and an portable, external hard drive for carrying my documents and files around with me.  So how has mu experience of using these gadgets gone then?

Lets start with the laptop.  Although it shames me to say it I purchased a PC rather than a Mac.  The reasons were simple.  The laptop will be used to power the interactive whiteboard and work and the classes I teach all use Windows.  Therefore I could hardly demonstrate on a Mac and then let them use Windows.  Also price was a consideration.  I have to say though that I have regretted ever moment since the purchase.

Lets get this straight first of all, that if you want a laptop then the Toshiba Satellite Pro A300D is a good buy.  With an AMD Turion x 64 2GHz processor (Dual Core) and 3GB ram along with its 160GB hard disk the computer is great and provide ample computing power in order to do most tasks.  This is not were my fault lies.  As most laptops do these days, it came with Vista.  No problem there until you get to the fact that it was Vista Home Premium and you cannot marry Home Premium with a domain.  Therefore I would have to be wiped and rebuilt using Windows Vista Business (which can’t play DVDs and so on….).

The process seemed simple, you shut down, insert the Windows Vista Business DVD, reboot from the DVD drive and then let the disk do its job answering a few question here and there.  Then we booted and finished you download all the drivers from the Toshiba website, install them and hey presto you have a great spec laptop hooked up to the domain and away you go.  If only it was that simple.  Installing Vista Business was fine but the drivers afterwards, not so good.  I couldn’t get the display to work (in fact it is still not working properly - see below) and also the wireless card was not working and I just kept getting an error messages saying that the hardware was not present.  Armed with this failure I decided to plug in an Ethernet cable straight into the router (the LAN driver was fine) and then see if Vista could find the drivers itself.  It managed to find the Wireless Drivers but not the graphics card.  Therefore I went straight to the ATI website for the latest drivers.  I selected the one that it said on dabs.com were I bought the laptop, however although it displays correctly on the laptop I cannot get the external display to the projector to display in 16:9 aspect ratio or even letterbox mode.  I have had to settle with the projector cutting off the start menu!

Hassle from the word go are these PCs.  If it was an Apple you would literally just put the disc in and press go.  Petty we are not using Mac’s at work.  Talking Mac brings me onto Gadget number two for the week - the iPod.

In the end I decided to go for the iPod Nano 3rd generation (the square one).  They were going cheap on Apple’s refurbished stock store and therefore I picked up the 8GB model for less than £75.  Great value.  First impressions are good.  It is slim and small with excellent quality music and video playback.

Finally today my external hard disk arrive.  I went for a Seagate Freeagent portable drive with a 250GB capacity.  Again I have only had limited use so far but it is small and seems to connect to the laptop fine, which is what I intend to use it for.

P.S. sorry to Lisa Bettany for the title of this post, but it just seemed appropriate.  Visit her blog and you will see what I mean.