Dead Laptops Society (continued)

This is all a bit #firstworldproblems for which I can only apologise!

So anyway, self-determined digital detox is fine, but not when it's forced on you.  Especially the week before our holiday, when the control freak that I am goes into overdrive and needs to research every aspect of a trip.

In these days of smartphones and tablets, people may question the need to have a laptop at all.  But there's a lot of tasks which you need a laptop for, apart from the internet.  I do a lot of "word processing" as it was once quaintly known back in the day.  You can't print to your old-school wired printer, or scan to your old-school scanner, or access that digitised recipe archive.  You can't shop and print off that confirmation email.  You can't watch obscure telly clips with the hdmi wired up to the telly.  So there in so many words this is my digital life, my friends.  Which needs a laptop.

Anyway, it was out with the old ....

...the seemingly future-proof Acer Aspire.  I thought we would grow old together, being parted only for system upgrades as and when.  But that was not to happen, as it came to the end of its life just 3½ years after its arrival.  For this is 2013 and electrical equipment is not built to last - that's how the manufacturers make their money after all.  A computer is almost instantly obsolete the day after you buy it, depreciating in value to zilch with the arrival of faster processors, bigger memory, bigger drives. 

In with the new....

...just a few days before my holiday.  It's an HP Pavilion G6, and it's purple.  Which is a bonus as you know that's my favourite colour, but I bought it for the specifications which were pretty decent as at mid-September 2013.  The down side is that it's running Windows 8 which screams AVOID!AVOID!AVOID! as some bright spark seemed to think we wanted apps instead of the conventional start screen.  Well, that kind of thing's all very well for the smartphone and tablet brigade but is pretty useless with a conventional non-touchscreen laptop with a mouse pad.  But I'm not going to let it beat me and I'm determined to get to grips with it (and bought a book to help me).  Apart from that, we have bonded well and after the usual teething problems of reinstalling various programs and software, things are running smoothly so far.  I wonder how long this one will last?

Meanwhile, I've started up a savings fund and putting by a couple of quid per week to save up for the next one....! #ohyeoflittlefaith