Hello Mr White

Bought a new laptop today. Not for me I hasten to add, but for Number One Wife, who has some writing to do. Her old laptop, still proudly bearing its “Made for Windows XP” sticker, has taken to forgetting the date and time and whether or not it has a hard disk attached. Replacing the battery that causes these memory lapses involves taking the machine to bits and unsoldering and replacing a component with a very very long part number, and to tell the truth I can’t really be bothered.

So, it was off to up town to see what could be acquired at the, ahem, lower end of the market. And we happened across the beast above. It’s made by Asus, has a processor which will do the job (word processing, surfing the net, maybe a bit of Skypeing), 4G of RAM, a reasonable sized hard disk and even a USB 3 port on the side. It doesn’t have an optical disk drive, but I can live without that. And you can get it for less than 300 quid. Even managed to buy it from one of our students, who works in Currys Digital up town.

I took it home, and once we had got over the 36 updates it wanted to install, cleared off all the rubbish littering the disk and installed Microsoft Security Essentials it works a treat. The battery life is not stellar, but it has this really nice multi-touch mouse pad that lets you scroll and zoom really easily. A properly useful device for rather less than the price of an iPad.

When Number One Wife goes out I might even pop Visual Studio on it and see what it would be like for developing Windows Phone applications.