Yes, I’ve bought myself a laptop.  A brand new laptop, no less.  Running Vista.  Am I mad?  Well, no more than usual, it seems.  Because despite the overwhelming evidence supporting the idea that I was just jealous because two of my friends had also bought new computers recently (and my wife has a better mobile phone than I do), I have a sound and reasonable reason for needing a laptop.

I’ve not actually owned a laptop since my first year at uni, which was when I bought my very first computer – a bottom of the range Novatech notebook with a 366MHz AMD processor, 32MB RAM, Windows 95, and very little besides.  It was £600 too, which on reflection wasn’t actually the bargain I thought it was at the time.  Still, I got a good year of use out of it, getting it to do all sorts of things it wasn’t supposed to be capable of, like running all sorts of Windows 98 programs and running a skinning addon that made it look like Windows XP (which was very new at the time).  Since then I’ve only had desktops, and most have been Macs.

This new laptop (which I’m writing this blog post on, sat in my lounge on my comfy sofa), achieves two primary uses, plus a few other smaller ones.  (more…)

I wouldn’t say I was backwards, exactly, but I do have some very old technology sitting in my study, some of which is still in regular(ish) use.  To take an example, I have a PC sitting on my desk that is almost 7 years old.  Granted it’s only used for testing web sites, but it’s got to the stage where it’s struggling just to do that, and that’s taking into account that I reinstalled everything fairly recently too.

I also have an old Palm m125 which I’ve been carrying around with me to act as my diary, syncing it to my Mac when I remember to.  It does the job, just about, despite being older than the PC (it would have been new in 2001).  I say it does the job, actually it’s been throwing tantrums just lately, refusing to switch on and then losing everything in memory and thus any changes I’ve made since the last sync.

Then there’s my mobile phone, a Motorola L6.  Granted, it’s nowhere near as old as the aforementioned relics, but I did buy it back in 2006, so it’s a few years older than your average mobile.  I still reckon it’s got at least another year of use in it though, despite the paint coming off the bottom, a dodgy battery connection (sort of fixed by stuffing some paper between the battery and the cover) and a dead camera.

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Over the years I’ve owned a motley collection of computers.  My first (other than family computers) was a little laptop I came to university with.  It was relatively cheap, being in an end-of-line sale at Novatech, so it wasn’t exactly state of the art by the time I bought it.  It had a 360MHz AMD processor, 32MB of RAM, a 5.6GB hard disk, and ran Windows 95.  Not exactly impressive, even then.  Still, it did me fine for a year, though it did spend most of its life sat on my desk and wasn’t really mobile much.  After that came a 1.2GHz tower, with 128MB RAM, 20GB hard disk, and Windows XP.  Even though it was still entry-level it was a significant step up for me, and allowed me to play games.  Not very good games, but they were games nonetheless.

However, it wasn’t long before I grew tired of the plastic look of XP, and started modding my desktop with all manner of programs, making it look very little like Microsoft designed it to be.  Eventually I found myself themeing everything I could lay my hands on to make it look more like a Mac, striving for that perfect interface.  It was no surprise then when a few years later I bought my first Mac, a second hand G3 Blue&White.  Although originally it would have been only 450MHz the previous owner had stuffed a 1GHz G4 upgrade chip from Sonnet in there, which made a big difference.  In terms of numbers it should have been slower than the PC it replaced, but in fact it was still faster and smoother and certainly more satisfying to use.  Hooray for Apple!

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