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Saturday, August 09, 2008

Good or bad news first?

I guess I'll give you the good news first. I've just ordered a new laptop from Dabs.com. The bad news is that it's another Acer. I came close to dropping my antique desktop, Godzilla, out of the window today. I clicked the Firefox window, then made the fatal mistake of clicking the Control Panel link as well. Because I asked Godzilla to do two things at once, being unable to multi-task, the hateful machine took seven minutes and forty three seconds to decide what to do. Life is much too short to waste sitting around waiting for an uncooperative computer to do its thing.

Although I'm pretty uneasy at ordering another Acer, I've decided to take the plunge. It's an Acer TravelMate, said to be a lot tougher and more reliable than the Aspire range. It's a lower spec than I originally wanted, but I had to grab what I could afford, i.e. a maximum of £300. Had I waited a couple of weeks, I could have bought a higher spec one. But is it really worth paying a lot for a laptop, when they seem to conk out after a couple of years?

The spec's not too bad. It has a 1.8 GhZ Dual Core AMD Athlon something or other processor, and the fact that it has neither an Intel processor or an Intel chipset, makes me quite happy. I've always preferred AMD to Intel hardware. It has 1 MB of RAM, not two, as I wanted, but that's no big issue. I can easily upgrade that myself when the time's right. The new laptop should be with me between Tuesday and Thursday. And this time, I'm DEFINITELY purchasing an extended warranty from Acer. At least I'll be able to get back to blogging properly, and working on my new project, which I'll tell you all more about soon.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I certainly hope so! I'm so sick of 'computer says no' all the time.

Anonymous said...

Good luck - and start a fund for a back up... just in case.
I now have car problems, the radiator blew yesterday andit is stuck sixteen miles away on the other side of a mountain.

Anonymous said...

Oh no! Sorry to hear about the car, Aileni. Will you be able to get it fixed/home, anytime soon?

I fully intend taking out an extended warranty with this laptop. Also, I've acquired another desktop, which has a slightly faster processor than Godzilla. As it only has 128 MB of RAM, when funds permit, I'll be doing a memory upgrade, popping my hard drive into it as a slave, and installing Windows on the drive that's already in the PC. I suspect most of my problems with Godzilla come from my having rather foolishly installed XP Pro on a very small partition. Whatever happens, I refuse to be stuck with Godzilla again, for months on end.

Dragonstar said...

All the best with your new hardware Siani. Bet you can't wait!

Anonymous said...

No.One son can help me getting it moved, depends on whether I can get hold of my man tomorrow. It is parked at a bus company garage so should be ok. The grotesque thing is that this is a rerun. Ceri and I had the use of a Nissan Bluebird about ten years ago and we ended at the same spot with missing coolant. I got the car to it's home but...
Your backup plans sound wise. It's great you know enough to sort it all out.

sally in norfolk said...

something we just cannot live with out.... "computers" hope you have hours of fun with your new one :-)

jams o donnell said...

My firswt PC was an acer. It lasted well enough for 4 years.

 
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