While we were on our trip we swung into a Ballio’s electronics store. We don’t have these in Minnesota. While there we checked out there laptops. They had great rebate deals on all of the Sony laptops. I’m not an immediate fan of the Sony laptop, entirely because of their use of software to control things that I think should be done in firmware (screen brightness, speaker volume, etc.) Anyway, the price was great so I picked up a Sony VAIO VGN-S360.

This unit will replace my extremely venerable Fujitsu S-4542 that is now over four years old (read: ancient!). I’m liking the new unit a lot. I’m excited since it’s 80G hard drive will give me plenty of space to load a ton of astronomy software to use in the field. Plus it has enough horsepower to deal with digital photo manipulation in Photoshop on the road, another great feature.