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Not taking the tablets

Head Rambles Posted on by

I am becoming increasingly pissed off with this laptop.

The first thing to go in it was the keyboard.  There was nothing wrong with the keys as such, but the letters wore off and it was a fiddley fucking thing anyway.so I just got myself a plug-in keyboard.

Then the fan went.  It started sounding like a coffee grinder and in my attempts to fix it I finally and irrevocably broke my keyboard which didn't matter anyway.  The fan has since shut up so I don't know what's going on there.

Then it started playing silly buggers when I switched it on.  No fucking operating system!  Now I know for a fact there are two systems so that was, and is a pain in the arse.  I have to keep restoring a little block of files which fortunately I had taken the trouble to copy.  It still does that every now and then.

Today it fucked up my browser settings.  Nothing was updated or changed and it was working perfectly last night so something went wrong somewhere and of course I blame the laptop.  Why not?  Anyhows I had a backup of my browser settings but now my feed reader is telling me I have about 500 unread items.  Bugger!

I had a look around for a replacement.  I have this machine for about five years so I was expecting to find something fairly juicy for a reasonable price. 

What did I find? 

Crap!

It seems the market has been cornered by those fucking tablet things that look like a plastic chopping board.  I have seen enough of them as people keep waving them in the air.  Fucking idiots.  And if I don't want a crappy slab, I am restricted to laptops with smaller screens.  I don't want a smaller screen.  I like the size I have – 17".  I want to be able to see my porn images without squinting.

So the market now seems to consist of shitty tablets or piddley screens.  And even worse  I am compelled to buy a licence for that pile of manure called Windows 8 which I do NOT want. 

I did find a couple of machines on offer with 17" screens and a little more memory and disk space than I have at the moment.  After all I hope to improve things with a new purchase?  The trouble is that they are way up there in the four figure bracket.  The cheapest of 'em comes in at around double what I paid for this yoke.

Fuck that.

It looks like I'll just have to struggle on……..

 

Comments

Not taking the tablets — 17 Comments

    • I'm surprised!  I'm used to you lot buying stuff at silly prices, but the laptops on that site are much the same as the ones here [i.e. in excess of four figures for a decent machine].  They'd probably blow up on my voltage anyway!  😀

    • There probably are but there are two problems – they are probably back on the market because they are old and therefore low spec, and I have a distrust of second-hand electricals anyway.

      Unless I got one where I could recover bank details of the hard drive…..  ????

      • Oh ye olde cynic you. I've been buying secondhand for years with no problems save the normal ones like batteries dying or the fuck weak as gnats piss rubber cable 'reinforcement' on the power cables. Lenovo's last well, the more expensive (when new) Dells last well.
        Also another thing to consider is when a school moves home or gets closed they often leave laptops quite literally lying around. Cross the right palm with silver and one or more of them could be yours.

  3. Does it have to be a laptop?

    To be honest, I really prefer a desktop. The one I'm on at the moment was built for me by my local wizzkid who does all my computer stuff. It was pretty high spec when he built it four years ago (€450 including the case, but we re-used a couple of bits from the old one, like CDRWs – which have since been replaced anyway – and the old HDD ) and we've upgraded it a few times since. When the HDD packed up a couple of years ago, we put a 1Tb replacement in and he upgraded the OS from XP to W7 64 bit (I don't ask how he does it, but my W7 gets all the updates, no prob).

    A desktop is so much more flexible and so much cheaper. You can connect a 48" screen for your porn images if you like, too. We have a laptop as well, but I let my wife use that. I don't like it. I only ever use it if I want to sit outside, or when we travel.

    If you want bangs for your buck, GD, a tower unit and peripherals is the way to go. Pisses all over a laptop.

  4. I haven't bought a tablet yet. Instead I continue to buy things that I can hold in my hands and read anywhere –    good old-fashioned books, mainly paperbacks. They don't give problems with fans, internet crashes or pop-up ads. I don't need to recharge spent battery power, just read with a pair of reading glasses.

    • There is only one problem with those yokes – they're damned hard to write….  🙁

  5. Why not try a Mac ?

    The best value is a desktop iMac but the laptops are excellent too.

    • I tend to agree with Frank Davis and a couple of other bloggers that Apple, having said that they won't honour guarantees if the owner was a smoker, took themselves off my shopping list forever. Didn't want their employees exposed to 'third-hand smoke' or some such poppycock.

  7. Surprised your laptop lasted so long quite frankly, the amount of times you must have had Sharon on it !

  9. When it comes to laptops and occasionally, desktop PCs, I tend to buy from IT resellers and when it comes to laptops for myself and Herself I always go with Lenovo ThinkPads. You hardly need new these days and new means EFI instead of the good 'ol BIOS which just means adding another layer of Pain-In-The-Arse when dual booting with A Linux distro. Here's the IT reseller I buy from:

    http://www.piapc.com/Default.aspx

    It's in the US but it gives you a good idea on the prices for the kind of features you get. I bought two ThinkPad R61s sans OS for $200 a piece (Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 GB DDR2, 100 GB/7200 HDD, all Intel chipsets (graphics [X3100 HD), audio, Ethernet & wireless). I replaced the 100 GB HDD with a 250 GB on Hers and upgraded the memory to 4 GB on mine. All in all it brought the total price up to less than $300 a piece. With 4 GBs of DDR2, mine runs Windows 64 bit or Linux Mint 32 or 64 bit like a champ and has enough graphics power to run Google Earth with no problem.

    Don't suppose you folks have an IT reseller around your parts?

    • We barely have new IT sellers here.  The only places I know of are PC World and Power City.  There are a couple of on-line sales places such as Komplett but I avoid them like the plague these days [since they sold me a keyboard with the wrong layout and wouldn't change it "because they only sell generic keyboard layouts"].

      My problem is that I would want something that is an upgrade from my present one, and the strange thing is that I can't find anything near my current spec for a reasonable price.  Just as a small example, I currently have 4 USB ports [all in use most of the time] but modern machines only have three at the most.  Strange.

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