“You look ready to go to me.”

I stood there for a moment, examining the large black briefcase that lay before me. I was truly intrigued.

Personally, I use my own Toshiba laptop that my mom bought me in 7th grade. The old laptops’ bulky carrying case was a complete turn off, as it made my backpack look like a mountain. With the advertisement of the absence of a case in the newly distributed ProBooks, my interest in using the school laptop was rekindled.

After receiving the briefcase before my World History class, I immediately felt the urge to open it up and start to examine it closely. However, my WHAP class was quickly steered back in to our seats with our notebooks out for notes. My curiosity would have to wait.

The opportunity finally reappeared as I plopped down at my desk after a tiring day at school and a workout. I slowly tore the Velcro back to reveal the treasure inside. I reached in and pulled out the ProBook, hoping for the best. What I observed before me was a pleasant surprise.

Just through the hand check, I could feel that the ProBook was sturdy and durable, easily surpassing military grade. At the same time however, it was sleek, with a nice glossy finish on the exterior. With this alone, I was already impressed. Elated, I quickly tried to power it up.

“Tried” is the keyword as I spent a solid five minutes looking for the power button. I initially searched for the power button at the usual place: above the right side of the keypad, above the left side of the keypad, etc. After that, thinking that the technology given to us was much more advanced than it was, I started swiping the top of the keypad believing that there was an invisible touch bar. For everyone who hasn’t opened their laptops yet, I’ll do you a favor by telling you it was on the left side, next to the USB ports.

As the laptop was logging in and updating software, I took another look at the hardware that the ProBook had. It seemed to have all the necessities: enough USB 3.0 ports for flash drives and charging phones, a HDMI port, a VGA port and a slot for SD cards.

I then began to look up some specs of the laptop I was so closely examining. The laptop has a 7th generation Intel Core i5  processor, plenty of power for high quality video. The 4 GB of RAM is fine for what the laptop should be used for. Even if you’re a heavy web user, you can get by with 4GB of RAM, unless you frequently have 20+ tabs open. Finally, I tried out the touch screen and camera.

To put it simply, the touch mode was responsive, really responsive. Scrolling felt clean. With the tablet mode of the ProBook, I was able to dish out surprisingly high resolution photos.

With all the good things considered, I did discover some downsides. By virtue of being an 11-inch laptop, text was hard to read at times without zooming in. Furthermore, I discovered that the glare from the screen was quite severe, even with the brightness on the maximum capacity, using the laptop in sunlight makes working almost impossible.

Overall, my take on the new laptops was positive. With my personal Toshiba getting slower and slower, and the battery life shortening by the charge, I am starting to open up to using one of these newfangled devices full time.

Just as technology moves forward, my philosophy is that we need to do the same. Change for me came in the form of a new laptop.  I have vowed that the ProBook will be a part of me from this moment, that is, unless the Tech Guys catch me without my laptop sleeve.