Finding a laptop to hire

I can understand that hiring a laptop is not the most common thing in the world these days. After all, why would you hire a laptop when it's so cheap to just buy one? And if you're going overseas and you need a laptop when you get there, why not just bring your own? But I would have thought that despite these things, there would still be enough demand to make it reasonably easy to find places that rent laptops. Especially in the San Francisco bay area, which is one of the most hi-tech and online places in the world. Considering what a hard time I had finding a laptop hire service, I guess not.

I started looking for a laptop hire place yesterday. I made about half-a-dozen phone calls yesterday, to various places in San Francisco and nearby, that were listed in the Yellow Pages as possibly offering 'computer rental services'. Most turned out to actually not have laptops available for rent. Others turned out to be too far away, for poor little ain't-got-a-car me (e.g. Hayward, which is a fair way further than Oakland). And still others ended up being too expensive and requiring credit card imprints. Nowhere fitted my bill.

Finally, this morning I found a little one-man computer service joint in Downtown San Francisco, that rents quality laptops for a reasonable price, and that accepts cash security deposits instead of credit card imprints. If you're ever in San Francisco, and are in need of a rental laptop, I highly recommend that you visit Millenium Technical Services. They'll take care of you.

So, mission accomplished!

I now have myself a shiny new HP Pavilion dv6000 Widescreen laptop, until next Monday. This baby sports an AMD Turion 64-bit 1.6Ghz processor, 2GB of RAM, an nVidia Geforce 6150 graphics card, an 802.11g wireless network card (54Mbps), and the brand-new (and crappy-as-reported) Windows Vista Ultimate. I'm having fun taking her for a spin already.

Beefy little thang, innit?

It was pretty important that I found myself a laptop for the week, because going to the OSCMS Summit 2007 without a laptop would really suck. And going to the Drupal Hackfest without one would be plain stupid.