Researching for buying a laptop in Japan is hard when Knoppix doesn't display Japanese

[dr4b]

[Poll #1141541]
I have to admit that I'm kind of tending towards the MacBook for various reasons, but I kind of won't know for sure until I can do some actual laptop shopping. I wonder if I can head up to Urawa on Saturday after work and have a look around some shops there. But several people have recommended the Macbook to me and I have to admit it sounds pretty tempting. The only major downside is that it would seriously cost over half of my monthly salary... probably even more... and I'm not even talking about the Pro, which would cost OVER my monthly salary I believe. But I think getting an English keyboard would be easiest with the Mac as well.

I know I have an attitude mostly of "eh, it's only money" but I guess since I'm kind of staring in the face of having to pay for a laptop, a plane ticket or two home to America for Carnival (hopefully, argh, I got stuck on that process when my HD died), all of the shoes and tacos I will buy in America, a trip to Hokkaido for Golden Week I hope, and I really wanted to get a point-and-click camera besides my cellphone as well as the 18-200 VR lens for the D200 and... but... really, these are all things I want to do. I could just do none of them and not even get a new laptop. So I need to stop thinking like this and just go ahead and spend the money on things. After all, this is why I saved money before moving here and have been saving money since I came here, right?

Anyway, today wasn't too bad. Using knoppix nodma has worked great and thus I effectively kind of have a computer here again. I mean, it's still weird running a skeleton OS on my CD drive and I know I can't do this indefinitely but my god it's better than not having anything at all. Plus it's really been kinda fun rediscovering things like gaim (and chatting with alibash! yay!), and the GIMP (with which I edited the picture below of my HD, taken with my cellphone), and just various Linuxy things. Unfortunately I don't seem to have any Japanese capability on this though which makes it hard to look for information on the web about things like Apple store locations and whatnot, but that's ok, I can do that on my cellphone or at GEOS tomorrow or something like that.




I mostly put this here for the sake of my dad and others to understand that it's not trivial for me to figure out a way to connect the thing since it's just this arbitrary connector... I'm more used to desktops and IDE cables and all. I know very little about laptop hardware in general.


I got sushi for lunch at Heiroku and at first it was really crowded AND there was absolutely nothing I wanted on the belt and it made me kinda sad, but eventually things came out that were good. I had forgotten that today started the one-plate-free campaign and the cashier was like "Do you have a coupon?" and I'm like "Errr...?" She looked at me like "You forgot again, didn't you?" "I'm sure I forgot. Forgot what?" "The one plate free special," and she went and got out a coupon and used it for me and thus I saved 105 yen. I was like "I will absolutely remember the coupon when I come back." I think. Or maybe I said "I will always have good memories of these coupons." Japanese is weird.

I also went to Matsukiyo looking for some Tylenol because I had a headache. They apologized to me for the fact that they can't sell Tylenol higher than 300mg per tablet.

Quotes of the day:
1) "Does this bus go to the Spongebob?" from my 12-year-old student.
2) "Oh, we call it 'shi' in Japanese, so it isn't a drink with jam and bread." from a later student
3) "I'm so sorry I can't come to lesson. I'm looked forward to playing Catan today. I want to play in next week." in an email from another student

Yeah, so I only had one student at 9pm (the one who had brought Catan in the first place). So we didn't get to play :( We did go over some more rules and a whole bunch of random words about games and dice, oddly (I gave him a copy of my polygons/polyhedrons paper). But, Duane visited us again tonight! My student invited Duane to come play Catan with us next week, haha. That would be really awesome. Though if all 3 of my students show up and so does Duane, I think I won't get to play :)

I did more popping of music after work. I sight-read and passed a lvl28 as Extra Stage, but since it was just Tir Na Nog, I'm not sure that it actually counts.

Comments

[rapier1.livejournal.com]

I've had a Mac laptop for the past few years and I do like it. Its great for doing the sort of development work that I do. However, when I'm at home I use windows and linux. I don't know if I would ever buy a Mac if I had to pay for it myself either.

[bzarcher.livejournal.com]

Glorious power of laptoppy awesome! Especially with bootcamp.

[sorakirei.livejournal.com]

If you are heading back to the US for Carnival, would waiting until you are in the US to buy a new laptop be out of the question? Or if you want to have one built, you could always have it shipped to a friend here in the US and then you get it later.

*shrug* I have a feeling you'll manage somehow to get a new lappy in japan that you can work with.

[dr4b]

I'm not sure I can deal with having no real working computer for two months, no. But we'll see. At this rate I might not even get tickets and time off in time to come home for Carnival anyway.

[genericman.livejournal.com]

My four-year-old PowerBook is really showing its age so I just plunked down the cash for a new MacBook. Even with a three-year warranty, a 250 GB hard drive, and 4 GB of RAM (!!) from Crucial, it's less than $2,000. I have high hopes that it'll last me well into the next Presidential adminstration.

[dr4b]

$2000 wouldn't seem so bad to spend for a laptop back when I was making a US software engineering salary.

But right now $2000 is quite a bit more than I take home in one month after my rent and other stuff is taken out of my paycheck.

Did you get the Pro? Or just the normal Macbook?

[genericman.livejournal.com]

Given that I have rent and a mortgage to pay (and nobody's living in my Pittsburgh place at the moment) I had to get a little beer in me to justify $2000 on a laptop. But I justified it by saying to myself, I'll have this for years to come.

Vanilla MacBook, in white, maxed out as I could.

I'm about to take the old powerbook out back and shoot it..

[ariel72.livejournal.com]

But it's ready to die. The new Macs have covers you can put on them to protect them. If you don't want to spend your entire salary.. you can do the apple loan thing for part of it... and pay it off in a month or so. I'm going to be shopping for a mac soon.. I want to raise some money for it first so I can pay it off in a month or more. Also the macbook's have photobooth so you can take pics right where you are sitting.. warp the heck out of them if you wanted to. :)

Good luck Laptop shopping, whatever you get.

[jayspec.livejournal.com]

Mac Book is awesome. Mac Book Pro is super-awesome but overkill.

[oren.livejournal.com]

Consider getting a new laptop hard drive? Cheapest solution available.

[msde.livejournal.com]

Depending on whether she ever needs it to be portable, an external USB drive might really be the cheapest.

[dr4b]

I considered it, BUT I think there's actually a deeper problem here with the laptop's actual connector. We had this happen before, remember? I think you even helped me take apart the laptop and look at it... because it was like, if I tilted the laptop weird or hit it really hard it would work again?

I realize that buying a new desktop last time around might have been a sort of stupid idea, but in this case it would be really nice to have a laptop that weighs less than 10 pounds and has a battery life of over 50 minutes, too. (or more like 5 minutes these days -- I haven't tried using the battery for more than a minute since the big battery failure a year ago)

[msde.livejournal.com]

The Eee is a tempting option at $400 or less, as long as you can deal with the small screen. In fact, the Eee is one of the bigger reasons my current laptop's HD is slowly dying from bad sectors instead of me replacing it. I don't know about Japan, but I can't get a laptop HD at a decent price point without spending $100-$150, which is half the price of the cheapest new laptops. I'm holding off primarily because I want tablet functionality on my next laptop.

I've heard that the Eee is manageable with 4GB (and no HD to break!) and a wear leveling SDHC card for supplementary space.

[the2belo.livejournal.com]

I voted for the HP, but I'm sort of biased because that's what I have.

Barring that, you know, I have an extra 40GB IDE laptop hard disk that I can give you...

[dr4b]

Will that connect to my laptop? I admit I have no fucking clue what kind of connector that thing is.

[the2belo.livejournal.com]

If it's a standard laptop IDE hard disk connector like I suspect it is (going by the laptop's age as you mentioned), then I think it will. Nowadays it's pretty standard. I don't think it's a SATA.

[dklegman.livejournal.com]

A few years ago, I got the bargain-bottom model of iBook, and I carried it all over the place for a couple or three years. Tough little laptop. Aside from sending it in for complimentary service when the internal video cable broke, it was nigh-indestructible.

It was molasses slow, but for the price and what I was using it for, I didn't care.

[sleeplessone.livejournal.com]

The connector on the hard drive is either normal 44 pin laptop IDE or SATA. There is a plastic adapter over the pins that makes it easier to remove and reinsert into the bay.