This arrived today from Amazon – much cost £1200. I hadn’t planned to go shopping for a computer. What happened? My regular laptop which I bought in May 2011 from Amazon had been developing a power input problem, then a hinge got broken – not by me (and there’s another story about that).
Yes the hinge just broke – through wear and tear – of normal opening and closing, after 2.5 years. Well, so I discovered when I opened it up after studying hinge repairs on YouTube for my model of computer. Estimated cost of a repair shop job would have been at least £150 in parts and labour. The resale value of the computer if I threw it on Ebay (in full working order), around £250. With the broken hinges, much less you can imagine. So – I decided, to fix the hinges myself, taking all reasonable precautions not to cause damage (even by static electricity). Hinges were fixed but then on putting back the computer together it would not start (i.e. only a slight flicker of the fan for 3 seconds but no post). I tried everything I could think of, but could not revive it. I felt bad about it. So the loss is probably around £100.
Oh well, what next? I definitely cannot function without a laptop; too much happens with me via a laptop. So I went out shopping. After weighing up umpteen variables and several different computers I settled on the Toshiba P70-A-11R. Online reviews were very mixed, and made mostly on pre-production models of this computer. There were no YouTube videos that properly told how this one functioned. But I gathered that the Intel Core i7 Haswell chip was the one to look for, and this thing has got it.
This machine has two 1TB hard drives, 16GB RAM an upper middle performance graphics card, WiDi and a Blu-ray drive (amongst loads of other stuff). The screen is 17.3 inches at longest diagonal. Battery life was not likely to be great on such a high-end machine. It was estimated at between 80 mins and 3hr 30 min – but nobody really knows for sure. But here’s the thing, I hardly every use a laptop without an external power source for more than an hour. Importantly, many trains these days have power sockets. This laptop is heavy at 3kg. But what does one expect with such a large machine? The sound system is amazing! Then there is a neat thing where in two clicks I can wirelessly play music and video from my computer onto my SmartTV. Me like-eee!!! LOL.
I recall how good I felt when I had bought the previous computer – I could do so much more, that I couldn’t have imagined before I got it. And on this occasion it is the same feeling all over. In 2.5 years so much has changed; it is hard to explain here. The important thing is that sense of ease and control over the things that I do with computers – and this machine has given me that feeling and confidence. I mean this is similar to my radical change of model of car a few years ago from Toyota to Jaguar. It is only when you make the change you realise something quite different, that couldn’t be imagined.
Which brings me to the silly sort of comment I often hear from Brits – it goes like this, “I can’t imagine what a [new whatever] will do for me.” Well – like duhh! Of course you can’t imagine it. In 1975 I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to use a mobile phone – and hello – a mobile phone is not just a phone.
Oops – I’m about to be accused of twisting somebody’s arm to buy a new computer. Who’s that? Anybody who reads this. Here’s the news: don’t do anything. If you’re stupid and myopic you deserve to remain that way! Kindly continue to limit yourself by whatever words you want to tell yourself. After all, you are fully entitled to you – stupid you that is. Errh.. some may have forgotten that I’m no longer on a bandwagon to punish the stupid. I’ve simply changed to a more efficient strategy i.e. get the stupid to cause themselves more suffering.
