BillstronBlog

Eric Chavez, Oakland Athletic’s gold glove 3rd baseman, plays video games. He even owns one of my favorite nerd toy, a Sony PSP. He’s not the only one in the A’s clubhouse either. About 8 other A’s have PSP’s, including starting pitcher Joe Blanton from UK. I learned this when I happened upon this article about him being filmed for recreation in a video game. The article goes a bit farther than just video games though. Chavey tells a couple of interesting stories too. Apparently, Eric Byrnes plays left field with a salmon. Read the article to learn what I mean. It’s pretty funny. Go A’s!

I have been shopping for a laptop since learning that I got into graduate school. Whenever I am spending large quantities of money, I develop a very specific criteria on which to base my purchase. I am a mechanical engineer. So I need a laptop that will run 3D CAD programs (SolidWorks in my case). I also want to have the power to play the latest computer games. This necessitates having a powerful video card. Also, through online forums, I learned that SolidWorks runs better on nVIDIA hardware. So the first piece of my criteria became an nVIDIA graphics card with at least 64MB of dedicated ram (more is always better though). Secondly, I will be shlepping this thing to and from school daily, so it has to be light. My weight limit became a loose 5lb (it can be a little over 5lb, but not 6lb). Finally, I don’t want the list price to be much over $2000. If I find the perfect solution and it cost $2100, I would still buy it.

The Toshiba Tecra M3 perfectly fits the bill. Check it out here. It is customizable with a nVIDIA GeForce™ Go 6600 TE with 128MB of ram, a 1400×1050 resolution LCD, Wireless B/G, and Bluetooth, and It weighs in at just about 5lb. The best part of the Tecra M3 is the price. With the above specs, 512MB ram, a 40GB HDD, and a CD-RW, it lists at about $1800. I have not found another that comes close to these specs at this price. Check out the Notebook Review article here.