My Little Buddy

This post is a tribute to my 4+ year old Compaq Laptop that I have taken to calling "little buddy" for the last year ago.

I just did a battery test on buddy (meaning I turned off all power-saving features and let a fully charged battery drain to see how long the battery lasts) and am happy to report that he's holding strong with 6% of the battery left after over 2 hours of being on continuously. Now it's up to 2 hours and 2 minutes. How awesome is that? Two hours of battery life after 4 years! What an awesome little laptop.

I'll admit, Little buddy's had his fair share of disastrous moments; and I've had him in pieces on more than one occasion. I replaced a fan, reformatted him twice, but that's pretty much it. Other than that, this little budget-laptop that weighs just over 5lbs has performed remarkably over the last few years. Even today I can easily use him to do the following tasks fairly well:

• Audio Editing
  
• DVD and Xvid movie viewing, even in HI-Def (720p)
  
• Photo sorting and cropping and uploading in google picasa (easy)
  
• High-level graphic design and photo editing in fireworks and adobe photoshop
  
• Video editing (if I wanted to: I don't)
  
• All my music and itunes needs for on the go
  
• DJ-ing at live events (rare)
  
• Video Games on their basic settings (it's not a gaming laptop).
  
• And yes it can browse the internet and open Microsoft Word fast
  

I would say with a fair amount of confidence that this little guy can do many of those things above as well as any new laptop that you could buy for under $1000 today (and all this with only 512MB of RAM).

I think that for 4 years old, this is a bit unusual. I think I got a reverse-lemon or some sort of thing but I have to say (now at 2 hours and 8 minutes) I'm pretty well peachy happy with this laptop. I think he's got another year at least. So there you go. And especially all you mac users out there who still think that macs are better. I challenge you to find even one person with a 4 year old mac who's still happy using it. Good luck.

DK