Bryan Geraghty

For Christmas this year, I received a Dell XPS M1730 Laptop to help facilitate my home studio recordings. This laptop will happily handle anything you can throw at it but it has one undesirable trait: its size. What Dell fails to advertise is the fact that this is largest 17″ laptop on the market and it won’t fit into most 17 inch laptop bags because its dimensions are 16″x12″x2″. It’s a monster when you compare it to a 17-inch MacBook Pro at 15.4″x10.4″x1″. Dell does offer a very nice back-pack case designed specifically for this laptop. The problem with it is the fact that it was specifically designed for this laptop. There is not much room left for anything else and the bag itself is huge which makes for quite cumbersome travel.

The real problem I have, is that I take my SLR camera and some extra lenses with me everywhere I go. Anytime I travel, I also take my laptop. So far, this has meant carrying either more bags than I’d like, or over-stuffing one. As we all know, over-stuffing isn’t a great option for delicate equipment.

Dell XPS M1730, meet the Tenba Shootout Photo/Laptop Courier bag

The internal dimensions of this bag are a perfect fit at 16.5″x12″x7″. The icing on the cake is that Tenba is a renowned manufacturer of camera cases and they seemingly had my struggle in mind when they made this one. So far, I have loaded my laptop, the power supply, mouse, memory card reader, and my SLR in the bag. Everything is neatly divided and there is still tons of space; but most importantly, everything is well-protected.

Well done, Tenba.

About a month ago, I purchased a Subway Rocket and said I would put some sound clips up. It’s taken a while, but I’ve finally gotten around to it. Well, I got around to making one :)

Sound Clips:

Mesa Boogie Subway Rocket Tone – Contour Mode

I’ll post the others soon, I promise!