It’s ‘cheng meng’ on the very same week i came back from perhentian so like the usual years, i followed my dad to Nilai Memorial Park to clean up and pray my grandfather who passed away 5 years ago. Actually it was more like praying since the place is pretty much cleaned by the workers there frequently. This year is a little better compared to the past experience i had as we usually will stuck in jam before we even reach the entrance of NMP but this year there wasn’t much of a jam, there were alot of people but not to the extend that cars are having problem moving.
I spent the following week pretty much on considering which laptop to get as pc fair is coming right up on the weekends. I was looking for something not too heavy and is good enough to support my usage. I looked at Dell Studio 15, BenQ S42, Asus F81SE, HP DV3 and whole lot more and a day before pc fair i’ve decided to look out at Asus F81SE and HP DV3. Both comes with same processor which is T6400, spec is pretty much the same except Asus has a better graphic card and is 14″ while HP is 13″. To be honest i was siding more on Dv3 since it weight only 2kg and looks far more elegant compared to Asus. Moreover they are throwing a Rm700 rebate on DV3 making it Rm2999. Asus F81SE was listed for RM3099.
So on Friday (10/4/2009) which is the 1st day of pc fair, i went to the pc fair at KL Convention Center with Chun Guan along with 2 of his friends to look out at the laptops. I was around Convention Center around 1050am and all the car parks around convention center are full, worse still is the parking in convention center is full too!!at the end i had no choice but to try my luck with KLCC parking and luckily there were still quite a number of parking spots available. Can’t imagine how those who are coming later are gonna park their cars.
We then meet up at KLCC and walk over to the convention center with only HP and Asus on our mind. We first checked out HP DV3 but to my surprised they told me that the warranty for HP is only valid for Asia Pacific which will be a real disadvantage for me as i was planning to bring this laptop to UK for more than a year. After several minutes of conversation they told me i can upgrade it at a free, worse still, i have to deal directly with HP as they do not know how to do it. With abit of disappointment, we walked up to a Asus booth to check out the F81SE and our ‘nightmare’ begins. We were told that the cheaper spec we were looking at is not available in this pc fair but the high spec ones (P8600, vista premium, finger print reader) is available at RM 3788 which is about RM700 much more expensive than the spec we were aiming at. The plus side of this deal is that the salesman is willing to throw in alot of freebies (the usual mouse, ram, cooler and etc)which total up to 10 items. We didn’t have the chance to see the real thing as the display unit is still somewhere behind so we went off to have a lunch and consider the options we have before we return to see the real unit.
After lunch when we were about to go back to the same booth, we passed by the Toshiba booth and the M300 models actually caught our eyes with the nice shining surface finishing all around the laptop, i especially like the white light they use around the laptop making a perfect match with the grey body it has. Anyway we went back to the Asus booth and the display unit is ready to be molested by us (lol), to be frank i was a little disappointed with the material used on the touch pad area. A little too plastic in my opinion and i just don’t like the rough surface of it (they use the concept of netting). I then meet Kev which was covering the event and he told me there’s more laptop booth including another Asus booth on the upper floor so we went up with the hope that this 2nd Asus booth have the cheaper spec of F81SE available and yes, it is available but in white instead of black. It still looks good but the freebies given by this booth is rather poor compared to the 1st booth. Worse still, the salesman seems so unexperienced, it took him 5 minutes to figure out the model i’m looking for and in the end show me the wrong model. -.-” Having absolutely no idea on what to get at that moment, i saw the 2nd HP booth so i went over and clarify the warranty issue again with them. Surprisingly, they told me all HP laptop are covered with international warranty which in my case it is covered. At this point i’m pretty much swing towards HP again as it really do look much more solid and elegant with the bronze body.
Finally, i’ve chosen
surprised?haha, ya in the end i choose to buy toshiba M300-S411. It come with T6400 which is the same as DV3 and F81SE, the graphic card is ATI 3470 which is in the samw category with 9300M of DV3. Spec wise it’s pretty much there but it’s the outlook (reflective as you can see in the pic) and it’s combination with white light around the keypad is just too good to be ignored. Here’s a picture of it
It also come with harman/kardon speaker, someone told me this is the brand of speakers they use in lambo?
An overall look of the laptop
The profile pic my sis got for me =)
The laptop costs me Rm3099 which is well inside my budget =D
It’s getting long for this post, that’s all for now.
