By Gordon Meyer (P3GizmoGuy@gmail.com)

I thought I’d narrowed my quest for a new computer down to a Windows-based laptop with a Blu-ray R/W drive, because I want the flexibility of being able to easily take my work with me on the road.  But I’m frankly having second thoughts.

One of the laptops I’m looking at is a $3,600 HP portable workstation with the latest generation of super-fast Intel Core Duo processors (2.8 GHz), 4GB of RAM, 17” display and the option of using a docking station. 

What’s a docking station, you ask?  It’s a device you connect a notebook computer to that lets you connect an external keyboard, mouse, monitor and, depending on the model, expansion cards, internal hard drives and all sorts of other goodies that can give your laptop the expandability and functionality of a desktop. 

You simply attach your laptop to the docking station when you’re at your “home base,” and detach it when you want to take it on the road.  Depending on the feature base though, docking stations can cost $200 or more.  HP’s highest end unit has a $349 price tag.  So with a really good docking station, the price tag is now approaching $4,000 (plus tax).

Now if I was doing a lot of heavy duty graphics work, editing and disc authoring on the road, I could easily justify that level of investment.  But truthfully, if I’m going to edit video, author discs or do any number of other tasks that require a lot of computing horsepower, I’m most likely going to be doing that at my office and not on the road.

While there are a lot of online stores where I can custom configure a desktop system, since I was talking about an HP mobile workstation, just to be consistent, I went back to www.hp.com to configure a high-end desktop system.  Here’s what I was able to come up with for well under $2500.

I started with a base e9180t desktop system and tricked it out with a 3 GHz Intel Core i7-950 CPU, 9GB of RAM (more than double what’s on that laptop), a 1TB (that’s 1,000 GB) hard drive, an ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics board with DVI, HDMI and VGA adapters and a full GB of dedicated graphics RAM, a 21.5” HD-compatible widescreen monitor with VGA, DVI-D and HDMI connectors,  Blu-ray R/W drive that doubles as a DVD R/W drive, 7.1 channel sound card, and Logitech 5.1 channel speakers.

And I can easily add another 3GB of RAM and another terabyte or so of internal drive space.  Pardon me for a minute while I wipe the drool off my keyboard.

As I said in my last blog entry, for what I do, my mobile computing will primarily consist of writing either in Word or my screenplay software, perhaps update an Excel spreadsheet or PowerPoint presentation, surf the web, check email or watch a movie.

If it’s still a priority for me to have a Blu-ray drive on my laptop, there are Blu-ray equipped models starting at just under a grand.  Even if I go with a MacBook Air, which to me is the ultimate balance between portability and functionality (base price of $1500), this means that for about the same price as my uber tricked out mobile workstation with docking station, I can have both a kick ass desktop system for my primary work and a very cool laptop for when I’m on the road. 

In fact, to save even more money,  I can get a brand name basic laptop with wireless networking, a 15” screen, 250GB hard drive and built-in DVD burner for around $500, which means I can have my best of both worlds solution for about a grand less than getting the high end laptop alone.

Food for thought, eh?

This of course is the solution that meets my specific usage patterns and needs.  Your mileage may vary.

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 17th, 2009 at 9:51 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.