Why do the two have to be mutually exclusive? My laptop is rip-roarin' fast, yet light enough that I can use it handheld while standing at the bus stop.

Small and light. I miss the old Asus Eee PC's. I guess we were too much of a niche market for anyone to continue making a product for.

Mobility, because my work stays at work with the desktop. The Laptop is for fun and doesn't need the extra power for surfing...ummm the internet. Ya, that's right it's only the internet.

I try to go for performance, but at a budget. My ideal is enough to game, but I'm ok with not having it at ultra high settings.

Portability is not an issue, if I can fit it in to a backpack. My current laptop has a 17.1" screen, GTS 540m graphics. Not extremely powerful, but it's adequate.

How about a perfect balance of both? Been almost a year and still loving my xoom, can't wait for lte to get out here to my mountain, got 32 mb/s download speeds at the doctors office last week.

Yay! I'm not the only person out there that still owns a desktop computer.

leptogenesis wrote:Why do the two have to be mutually exclusive? My laptop is rip-roarin' fast, yet light enough that I can use it handheld while standing at the bus stop.

I would agree with this. Computing is now reaching a point where we don't have to sacrifice much to maintain portability and/or battery life. Also, cloud computing is allowing us to push more of our storage and processing to the cloud. I like a the setup right now of having a more powerful desktop at home, then emphasizing portability and battery life on a laptop. Assuming you don't play games or do other processor- & graphics-intensive tasks on a laptop, netbooks/ultrabooks are becoming more useful. Without a desktop, I would want a more powerful laptop, since I sometimes need access to more powerful computing resources.

CaviMike wrote:Small and light. I miss the old Asus Eee PC's. I guess we were too much of a niche market for anyone to continue making a product for.

Tablets pretty much ate up that market.

There's no such thing as a performance laptop. You have to spend two G's to even get something one could remotely consider high-end, then it eats battery life like it's going out of style. Not to mention a $1,000 desktop could still likely rip it to shreds. If you're not buying a laptop for mobility, you're wasting your money.

Tablet if you really need to get work done on the move. But once you get home, it's desktop all the way baby.

The hubby broke his "gaming laptop" through constant use. It used to be "high performance" - but for some reason it requires about an hour of "wake up" time now for the sound to behave. Don't ask why. We don't know. And we don't have the diagnostic fee to figure it out, either, so it's relegated to a shelf.

He's happy, he has a desktop computer now.

I go for performance. Although your laptop can be lightweight and compact, it will be annoyed if it doesn't work when you need it.

CaviMike wrote:Small and light. I miss the old Asus Eee PC's. I guess we were too much of a niche market for anyone to continue making a product for.

I still use my ASUS 1005HA (or is it HE?). Enough performance to do what I want to do with it.