With several possible work leads in sight, I decided I had to have a new laptop. My BT laptop, which I've been using for work the last 16 months, went back to BT a couple of weeks ago. My 'other' laptop, a Toshiba which I bought back in 2003, is showing worrying signs of ageing. The sound card occasionally gives up entirely, and the erratic functioning of the PSU has led to heartrending bleeping noises from the almost-drained battery on too many recent occasions.
So off to Basingstoke PC World this morning with Adrian, where we were helped by a charming young Polish tech guy with an unnerving grasp of the equipment choices on sale and their respective pros and cons.
So -- I'm typing this on an Advent laptop with 1.8 GHz dual core processors, 2 GB memory, 120 GB HD, 802.11g WiFi and of course Vista. To be honest, Vista was a calculated risk, but so far it's proven remarkably intuitive and has also successfully loaded several of my XP programs without complaint. I have a few more to install, it being an all-day job to get a new computer into usable shape ...
