Asus N56V – the superlaptop. Here running The Sims 3.

The day before yesterday, my main computer – the black tower desktop from Multicom – started rebooting randomly. Well, not entirely randomly: When playing games – including browser games – it turns itself off and back on every few minutes. When using just Opera or yWriter, it lasts hours.

The reason this started was probably the tropical heat, but cooling the machine down doesn’t seem to help it now.

A better man than I might have taken it as a hint from Above to stop playing games and get on the Jacob’s ladder of love, wisdom, self-reflection and progress,or something like that. But I am not a better man than myself, so the thought did not even strike me until after I had already bought a new laptop that is more powerful than the big black beast from 2009.

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 I have searched Google for reviews of the Asus N56V, but there are pages and pages of copy + paste of the same review, written about a pre-production model. Guys, don’t do this, copying and pasting other people’s reviews. Just link to it, for goodness sake. Like this: Asus N56V review at Techradar. Don’t fill up my first six Google pages with copy and paste.

That said, the machine is so new, there probably aren’t a lot of reviews up yet. And this one says it pretty well without going on and on. This is not a compromise between weight and performance: It is performance without compromise. Well, it is still a laptop, so you can’t put in extra video cards or extra hard disks or things like that. But everything you can do with your desktop that’s too heavy for a toddler to topple, you can do with this laptop.

OK, I may exaggerate slightly. But the machine is more powerful than my desktop from 2009, at least. It has a quad-core processor too, but more modern and faster; each core runs two threads. It has 6 GB of RAM – the tower machine has 4 GB but can only use 3.25 GB. Since some of the memory is used by Windows itself, any extra memory is available to programs. In the case of Sims 3, the difference is quite noticeable. It is pretty much the ultimate Sims 3 machine. And of course it can handle any sane business use, including speech recognition. So, the future has arrived, and it is portable.

(I still intend to fix the desktop. Someday.)