But what should I purchase? Currently, the new iPad is all over the news, and I carry an iPhone and know the ecosystem. Without doubt, the iPad is a nice machine. Our own Josh Windisch gave it a review with high praise after using it for a week. In fact Apple assures me that it’s brilliant (in its advertising).

But what about my use case? Would I be well served with an iPad when I’m interested in both consumption and creation of content? I don’t use any computer for gaming. A good keyboard has always been important to me too. I do a good deal of writing and work with numbers.  And I really don’t want to go further down the rabbit hole of a closed ecosystem, do I? In a scan of current moderately priced laptops, I turned to the Acer Aspire line. Nice 15.6” widescreen format display, fast dual core processor, 4 gigs of memory, built in DVD RW Drive and a lot of other goodies.  Yes, it is just shy of 6lbs in my backpack and with battery life of 4 hours, I may need a power brick. But this is a workhorse. But not content, I wanted to replace the physical hard drive with a solid state drive.  Checking with Acer, I found that is a 5 minute swap of drives with access on the bottom panel.  So, my order looked like this.

Sure enough, the install of the SSD took all of 5 minutes, and I loaded Windows 8 Consumer Preview and the full Office suite of apps and still had 90 gig of SSD space remaining. The Acer now cold boots in 20 seconds, resumes from sleep in eight seconds, is blazingly fast and has yet to crash or have any problems with the software I’ve thrown at it. The price, the same as I would pay for a new iPad (wi-fi only) with 64 gig of storage. Now I know that the choice of these devices is personal, but I simply marvel at how much more I get for my money with the Acer choice. What choices about technology purchases have you made recently, and why? We live in a golden age of low cost, high powered technology, and there have never been more interesting uses. How are you putting your technology to use in interesting ways? You know, speaking of that. You might be thinking you’re getting a great deal on a computer with a Core i3-i7 — but the chip models are older and not the fastest up to date ones. Anyway, that just came to mind. I have a lot of tech gear since this is the line of work i do. Comment

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