Laptops fall into this category. Yes, some laptops die an early death. But if you're gentle with your laptop, it's likely to last you far longer than might be practical for the software you might want to run on it or the tasks you want it to perform.

That's the subject of this article. In it, we ask the tough question: should you replace a perfectly good laptop?

To illustrate this issue, we took a look at two laptops, my personal (and very well loved) Acer Travelmate C100 convertible-style Tablet PC, and a Latitude D410 laptop that Dell was kind enough to provide us for this article. You can see both, together, in Figure A.

FIGURE A

Whenever two laptops get together to talk, there's always coffee. Click picture for a larger image.

Comparing the specs
Let's start by talking about the older machine, the Acer Travelmate C100, for which I paid something near $2,200 back in late 2002 or early 2003. First, this machine is a convertible Tablet PC, which means the screen can flip around and lie flat. I love this feature, and use it extensively for PDF reading, Web surfing from a comfy chair, and, sometimes, for making notes in notebook fashion.

Dell doesn't offer a Tablet PC, so I'm going to treat the Acer as a regular laptop for the purpose of this article. That said, the one feature you'd lose if you moved to the Dell is the wonderful, convertible tablet functionality.

Let's look at some specs. The Acer is teeny, about an inch and a quarter thick and weighs only 3.2 pounds. It has an 800MHz Ultra Low Voltage Mobile Intel Pentium III, built-in 802.11b (the slower WiFi), 256MB of RAM and a 30GB hard drive.

By comparison, the "ultra-portable" class Dell Latitude D410 is a little larger. It's exactly the same thickness as the Acer but weighs about half a pound more. As you can see from Figure B, the size difference is negligible and I honestly didn't even notice the half-pound weight difference.

FIGURE B

The Dell (bottom) is slightly larger than the Acer. Click picture for a larger image.