For those of you who follow me in Plurk, many of you already know by now that my laptop, a Compaq Presario C714NR died on me last week. Now you know why I haven’t updated or published new posts during the past week. Anyways, I took my laptop to BestBuy and had the Geek Squad check it. After doing a series of tests, they determined that it was the motherboard. I wasn’t that convinced because the guy I talked to didn’t sound too confident with his answers. I thought about asking a second opinion from another computer repair shop but since the laptop is still under warranty, I’m sending it back to HP/Compaq so they can check and/or repair it. I’ve already contacted them and they’ll be sending a box for shipping. I’m hoping that the initial diagnosis is wrong and that it’s not the motherboard that’s broken but something minor that can be easily repaired and is covered by the warranty because it only has a 1 year limited warranty.

Since I initially thought that the laptop was no longer under warranty and that I couldn’t have it fixed/repaired, I went ahead and looked for a new one to replace it. I searched online for the best deal I could find and found one over at BestBuy. It was for a Toshiba Satellite A305-S6872 which was on sale for $599 (regular retail price $749). Because I used a BestBuy credit card to purchase it, I was able to avail of an 18-month no interest financing offer.

Specifications:

• Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor T5800 with 800MHz frontside bus, 2MB L2 cache and 2.0 GHz processor speed
• 3 GB PC6400 DDR2 800 MHz SDRAM
• 250 GB SATA HDD (5400 rpm)
• DVD-SuperMulti± with Labelflash™ drive
• harman/kardon® stereo speakers
• 15.4″ WXGA high definition LCD widescreen display with TruBrite® Technology
• Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD with up to 128MB-1294MB dynamically allocated shared graphics memory
• Built-in wireless LAN Intel® Wi-Fi Link 5100AGN (802.11a/g/n)

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The Toshiba Satellite A305-S6872 was only available online so it wasn’t available for store-pickup and I had no choice but to pay for shipping. I bought it Wednesday afternoon and got Monday afternoon. I’m glad that I was able to get it while it was on sale because a couple days after I bought it, it was back to its original retail price. I’ve only had this Toshiba Satellite A305-S6872 for a couple days now and I haven’t tried all of its features like the webcam, media card reader and other stuff so I can’t write a review right now, but for sure I’ll be able to write a review in about a couple weeks time so watch out for that.

On a side note, now that I have this to work with, I’ll be doing a lot of catching up in the next few days – publishing new posts, blog hopping, replying to comments and emails. I’m also working on a new blog design/layout which I hope I would be able to finish and implement soon.

Thank you for your time and have a good day!