After three and a half years, I was forced to retire my ASUS A6500R laptop. The main problem was that it wouldn’t boot up properly anymore. The symptoms started a few months before but it managed to eventually start up after some combination of jiggling around with the battery, the master reset button, and the power cord.

Then about two weeks ago, those workarounds wouldn’t work anymore and so I had it looked at at the ASUS service center in Kapitolyo, Pasig. The initial assessment of the technician was that there is a fundamental problem with the motherboard. Weighing my options of having it fully diagnosed (with a service fee) and with replacement parts being really scarce (the laptop is 3+ years old after all), I decided to go for a new laptop instead. I’m in the notebook market once more!

I’m holding off buying a new laptop until November so that it would go into December’s credit card cycle for better cash flow management (the 13th month bonus would come in handy there). So until then, I’m going to do research to select the best laptop for my needs. Since I’m not a gamer nor a video editor, my needs are not for the cutting edge technology (unlike Lola Techie ). My knowledgeable colleague at work said that I could make do with the Intel Core-Duo Atom processors. One requirement I need however is that if the laptop comes with Windows Vista, then there must be a free upgrade to Windows 7 which just came out last Thursday. Hopefully, the local retailers have that Microsoft-announced upgrade option available from the PC manufacturers.

Since I’m not using the even older desktop PC due to a crashed hard drive (I was lazy to buy a new one), I currently using my ASUS Eee PC as my main computer. The small screen is getting to be a real bother, but I’m managing quite well so far. (In fact, I’m typing this entry on the Eee PC.) I also managed to salvage the dead laptop’s hard disk and converted it to an external drive. It’s a really, really good thing that Octagon Computer Store had some IDE hard disk enclosures available because these are apparently quite rare due to most hard disks nowadays being SATA. It’s also quite fortunate that the Eee PC was able to have at least read-only access to the drive’s NTFS partition and read-write access to the FAT32 portion so I still have access to all my files.

Expect a blog post in November where I will reveal my laptop choice.