OK COMPUTER

Technology time… Now I like my shiny new technology as much as the next person. Well, maybe not quite as much, if the next person is a techy type. But in recent years the constant and relentless, and never-ending of course, drive for new technology drives me insane. I don’t intend to sound like a dinosaur here… having grown up in a provincial town, before the internet existed (yes kids, there was this strange time once where it didn’t) and therefore having very limited access to anything I’m delighted by the leaps in technology in many ways. Although the way that the rest of the world works is taking a lot longer to catch up, hence all the shops closing down, publishing and music industries in the doldrums and so on, but that’s a blog for another time.
But the marketing behind technology does my head in on a regular basis. Take my phone: after owning my previous phone for, I think, six years, I decided to get a deal, a while before the safari started, and upgrade to a smartphone. So I’ve got one now, I like it and it’s a useful thing to have. But apparently a newer version of said smartphone has now come out. Therefore the marketing is telling me that I’m out of touch and will be ridiculed by all of my peers. I looked into it, and the new one does a couple of things that mine doesn’t do, but nothing especially earth shattering. The message here is, yes technology’s important, but let’s keep some kind of perspective on it.
Rant over.
So, we’ve needed a new laptop for a while. We really do: our other laptop is a nightmare to use and always has been. The keyboard makes the letters on the screen jump around (techy term there) and it’s slow and generally crap. We’re on secondhand safari so can’t buy new for a year, but when it comes to technology I don’t anyway. You can save an absolute fortune by buying secondhand.
I’m lucky because my brother is a total technical nerd person, so I phoned him (on my out of date smartphone) to ask him to choose a good computer for us to buy, as I don’t really know what to look for. He came back with a list, which were mostly around £300. From that we chose the one that’s £199, and the only reason it was  cheaper is that it has a tiny blotch on the screen which looks like a small hair, which we couldn’t even see at first. And one of the side protective doors doesn’t close. Which we can take off: our other laptop doesn’t have one anyway. My brother tells me that anything that has the stuff that this one has new would cost a minimum of £800.