We have just bought another laptop and in keeping with the ethos of this site we will tell you all about our mistakes and blunders, so hopefully you wont waste as much money as we do! We sadly bought a Toshiba Satellite 1730 for $2700.00 last year. The logic behind this was Toshiba has been making laptops longer than anyone else so must be the best! How wrong can one be! This proved to be a total disaster, as at the time we were using a Sony camera with floppy disks. To process digital photos you need to edit in a computer. The Toshiba could not even perform this simple task and locked up usually after the 3rd or 4th disk. We didn't lose data, but it was time consuming particularly in view of the dreadful reset procedure on this computer. (a sharp object up the "behind"!) It wouldn't even play the Around Oz CD's properly without glitches. We now know that the hardware just wasn't compatible with Windows ME. One would think that Toshiba would just replace ME with super stable Windows 98. Not so! Back up help from Toshiba is absolutely abysmal and they have lost our business forever. They advised us to fit the maximum memory - this did zilch! The screen turned out to be hopeless for our work, as just trying to find the mouse pointer can drive you batty let alone try to touch up and edit photos. So even if you just want to send emails and word process, this is not the machine! Yes folks we were totally stupid on this one, as all the magazine reviews said the same thing - great machine but unstable. In case you are wondering why we just didn't pop on Windows 98 - laptops are weird in that Windows is actually an "image" and goes on with all the drivers etc as most things including the modem are software driven.

So this time round we really did our homework, read every review and looked in all the moans and groans bulletin boards. We narrowed it down to the Asus or Sony VAIO. It ended up a no contest as the colours displayed on the Asus were not true - it was much darker than real life. We checked this in several shops as well. The cost is really amazing for what you get - an integrated multi media machine with all the software to get you going in digital photography and video. It even burns CD's and plays DVD movies! -  $2995.00.

Yes that's Harry Potter sitting there in the piccie above (loaned by our son!) in our mobile office! The display on the Sony is almost as good as the LCD monitors we use at home - it is that good! Memory is 256 meg and it runs on a 900mhz Celeron which works fine with the high end heavy number crunching Macromedia products we run. We can't heap enough praise on this machine! We got it right this time round! Ours came from Clive Peters. We cannot praise this firm enough as it is an absolute pleasure doing business with them. Our first digital camera came from them down in Melbourne when we knew just about zero on digital. The camera they suggested was perfect for our use. They rescued us again with a modem for our Psion hand held. We got nothing but misinformation from Harvey Norman yet Clive Peters actually had a specialist on staff to guide us.

TIP:- Try taking along KNOWN CD's when shopping. Vendors will NOT let you install anything but the Around Oz CD is a great gadget for testing as it auto runs and you know the colours backwards. Interactive music CD's are also another one which you will know.