Speak now, or forever hold thy peace.

Laptop is dead. Well – not dead in the sense that I can’t use it to get online, but dead in the sense that that’s all I can do with it. And even then it gets shirty.

Last night I posted I was going to reformat it. Today at about 3pm I suceeding in reformating it – it kept rebooting mid-reformat. The warranty has run out and it costs £20 to send it back and have them tell me there’s nothing wrong with it anyway, as I did twice previously to no avail. It’s now running with no battery in as it seems to think the stone cold battery that fused about 4 months ago and hasn’t worked since is overheating. And it’s still BSOD-rebooting if it gets stressed, like viewing a java animation. *resigned expression*

So *claps hands decisively* lappy is to become an extremely expensive doorstop. I’ve decided to go with Dell as they seem reliable. I have learned the hard way that you get what you pay for. If you buy a generic laptop from a crap company, you get a crap computer and worse support.

My personal requirements are a P3 or similar, 512MB RAM, a 30GB hard drive, and a combi dvd player cdrw. A decent graphics card is essential as I think that was one of the faults with this hunk of junk. I’ve found something that fits this:

Dell Inspiron 2200 notebook:
Celeron M360 (1.40GHz, 1mb L2 cache, 400 MHz FSB)
XP Home
40GB hard drive
512MB RAM
8x DVD+/-RW
Free delivery, free collect and return 90 days, free double memory, free colour printer.

All for about £450.

I don’t need a super duper multi-media all-singing all-dancing megalappy. I just need something that will store my smallish music collection for my iPod, play my budget games (if it ain’t <£10 I don't buy it ;)) and cope with PSP. Plus I've learned that if you buy over what you need (like I did with this one) when it goes wrong it's as much use as the minimal models, but it cost a hell of a lot more. I only used about 5gigs of my 60gig hard drive - why did I bother with that??? 40gigs is the smallest Dell do in lappies. Plus because I have a usb to ide wire (bought to try and reformat this computer when it went wrong last September) I can even use this hard drive as an external drive for the new compy, assuming it's reasonably healthy. Plus iPod is 20GB and is currently acting as my reliable store of files as last night when preparing to reformat this laptop it refused to burn cds. George the iPod is feeling a bit redundant at the moment. I've got bored of the games... Please speaketh up if you think my choice of new lappy is seriously bad - I sense I may not be fully judgementally normal...

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