It has been a long week. If you have kept up with my Twitter feed, you've seen some of the highlights. The week started off with restoring my girlfriend's old Dell Inspiron 1300 laptop. I am not sure what the deal was with the machine, but it did not have the PC Restore application on it that the documentation claimed. With no restore CD, I was forced to use one of my own copies of Windows XP Home to install and get it back into working condition.

That restoration is complete. I still have to install some basic apps, MS Office, and security apps, but then it will be on standby for any other family members who come due for a PC. In addition to that, I also wiped and re-installed my own Acer Aspire ONE for delivery to another family member. Hopefully it will serve them in good stead. After those two tasks for other people were complete, it was time to be a bit selfish and do some things for myself.

I think I posted earlier about the fact that it was time for the mid-year GearWERKZ upgrade. First on the list was a new laptop bag. Everyone knows that I have a fetish for booq bags. Two of the ones I have, however, I am not all that happy with. I've put off doing anything about it for a couple of years.

The first one that needed to go was my booq Powersleeve L. A nice looking bag on the outside, it was too slim to hold a power supply. So anytime that I took one, the bag had an unnatural bulge to it. Its replacement is a booq Taipan Slimcase M. It is a good compact bag, and accommodates power supplies and all of my normal daily gear (Motion LE1600, Keyboard, portable hard drive, iPod, thumb drives, and wireless modem).

Next on the list was a pair of Bose In-Ear Headphones. I am glad that these headphones feel more so mine; the last pair of everyday work headphones I had were not ones that I really chose; they were an emergent Circuit City purchase made while I was on travel. The Bose are good, but I do not feel that they are so great that they live up to the Bose hype. I need to actually sit for a spell and use them interchangeably with the last set of earbuds and get an immediate assessment of whether or not they are that much better. I will say that not having done that yet, I can definitely tell that the sound is warmer and richer, and that is at least a little bit of a plus.

Upgrade number three was another headphone replacement, specifically my noise-canceling headphones. Like my previous earbuds, these were an emergent on-travel purchase; a set of Maxell's from Wal-mart. These were not so much purchased because they were the only things that I could get my hands on to fill the bill. Rather, I picked out the Maxell's because I was not yet sure that I bought into all the hype about noise-canceling. I wanted a cheap set that I could use to weigh the benefits before I plunked down coin for a more expensive set.

Over the year of use, I decided that I did believe the hype, and that it was time for something mo' better. I settled on a set of Sennheiser PXC250's. I will have to report on these later as I have yet to put them to use.

Not planned as part of the normal upgrade package, I had an emergent upgrade get tripped because I was out of room on my MacBook Pro's hard drive. Since I run Boot Camp and the MBP is my primary iTunes machine, I knew I needed the same 500GB of storage that I had in my old MacBook, which used to fulfill the role of primary iTunes manager. I went with an Hitachi TravelStar 500GB. Since I would have to open up the case to get to the hard drive, I decided to also go to the 4GB of RAM that I had been thinking about so that I would not have to ever go back into the case ever again. It turned out to be an incredibly smart move. If I had had half a clue and thought to look up the tutorial on what how to upgrade a MacBook Pro Hard drive, I would have just bought a new laptop. Something like this MSI unit from Newegg. I've got some serious issues to discuss after this particular upgrade. More on that in a later post.

The last upgrade was driven by the earlier mentioned task of prepping my old Acer Aspire ONE for my girlfriend's sister, who was in need of an up-to-date PC. In the meantime, that left the 'WERKz down one machine. Specifically, I was missing the ultra-portable device that normally occupies that space. I considered several different striations of small form-factor laptops to replace the Aspire ONE. This was a machine that I had been very happy with, primarily due to its cavernous hard drive. It was one of the first netbooks on the market to feature a full 160GB hard drive. Going into something smaller was going to almost unbearable, and even just maintaining the 160GB level was a bit unnerving.

With my iTunes archive being about 32GB of tunes, and about 69GB of video, constantly having to pick and choose the video I wanted onboard for any single trip was a bit bothersome. In the search I considered the following genres of devices:

• MacBook (since I want to keep a Mac in the lab at all times, and it was not certain when I might upgrade the MBP, a MacBook was on the list for this upgrade; it fell off due to cost. I was letting go of a netbook that cost me $350. Replacing it with a MacBook for 4 times as much became questionable. Plus, I just struggled with what I would use it for that my MBP could not do...especially in light of the upgrade mentioned above)

• Ultra-Portable Laptop (any 11 - 13" Windows laptop; in this area the Samsung Q310 was the strongest contender)

• Razer-Portable (this is a new category I have defined for myself; in this stratum are ultraportables that are less than an 1" in thickness, and typically thinner, making compromises to minimize weight and thickness; however specs remain greater than those of netbooks

• Netbook

• TabletPC (I wound up not going this way because cost was a consideration; I would have only been able to pull a used one, like a Dell latitude XT or a ThinkPad X61, vice a new machine in a different genre)

• UMPC

• MiD (with so few models actually readily available in stock with any vendor, the prospect of going this route turned out to be quite dubious)

In the final elimination rounds, it came down to a Razer-Portable, a TabletPC, or a MacBook. Tablets were ruled out first because I wanted something new, not a compromise with a used model. Dropping the MacBook was tougher. The new models announced at the recent WWDC make these quite a buy, even the low end white MacBook. Despite the notes above describing my thoughts, I felt compelled to investigate multiple avenues of procuring a new MacBook as my replacement machine of choice.

I looked at refurbished models from the Apple Store, as well as new superceded models they wanted to get rid of. Still, with the MacBook Pro occupying territory in the 'WERKz, I could not bring myself to not look at something else.

Even then, an Apple product made it into the finals. Most of the Razer-Portables on the market were too much. Lenovo's and Samsung's offerings blow through the $1500 mark, with Lenovo being as high as $3k; preposterous. Ditto for Dell's Adamo. Acer has a new product-line on the way wearing the Aspire Timeline moniker. A 13" model occupies the low end, but the final verdict on their quality was not out on the street, and I was not even sure I was seeing them as being in stock with anyone.

MSI is producing its new X-Slim series, and the unit I was ogling had to be considered in comparison to a superseded Apple MacBook Air, some of which are going now for less than a grand. Again, cost was king, and the XSlim X340 offers a massive, 320GB hard drive in a package that is only 0.75" at its thickest, and still comes in cheaper than a used MacBook Air.

I'll have more on the X340 as I put some more time into it (whenever that is). Until then, that's a wrap at the 'WERKz. I also need to tell you guys about my switch to Sprint and a new pair of cell phones, but that will have to wait for another day.

- Vr/Zeuxidamas