Computers

Some people buy new computers from time to time, but I'm not one of them.  It's true that I have bought new computers for the lovely Jackie from time to time (because she's worth it), but for many, many years I've managed to get by on hand-me-downs from work.  Work computers used to get "written down" and often replaced after a couple of years of service, leaving them with a book value of nothing, but a lot of usable life remaining.  And being friendly with the people who replaced them, and disposed of the old ones, has proved very fruitful, over the years.  You don't get an operating system (the licences get recycled) but that's fine with me, I prefer Linux anyway.  Much more "make-do-and-mend".

My current general-purpose laptop is an HP EliteBook 8440p.  I think they came out in 2010, although mine might possibly be a bit younger.  This particular one also features a Spanish keyboard, which wouldn't suit everyone. It's great for accents - Olé! - but it doesn't have a £ sign.  Fortunately there are plenty of those free on the internet.  They keyboard is basically QWERTY, but all the symbols are in funny places (if at all).  That did take a bit of getting used to, it's true, but now I almost like it. QWERTY, but a bit QUIRKY too.  A couple of years ago I upgraded it with an SSD drive for about £40, so it's faster than it was when it was new.

A little while ago it did start to suffer occasional collapses, where it would just switch off unexpectedly, which is obviously very annoying behaviour.  Then one day it simply wouldn't boot at all, and I thought, oh well, its time has finally come.  I wasn't looking forward to setting up a new machine from scratch though.  All that tedious software installation... But soft! - I found that I could buy a seemingly identical 8440p, reconditioned, for just £60 on Ebay!  So, I reasoned, I could just swap my SSD into that, and it would just boot up and everything would be perfect - with a UK keyboard thrown in for free!

So I bought it, and installed the SSD, and - guess what? It didn't work.  Hmmm.  Just for fun, I put the new laptop's hard disk drive into my old laptop and pressed the button.  To my complete amazement, Windows 7 appeared!  Then I put the SSD back in, and it just booted up normally. Hmmm... again.  I swapped them lots of times but the results were just the same, so I just left everything how it had been originally (even the Spanish keyboard) and had a think.  Eventually I realised that I'd never, ever, cleaned out the fan ducting on this particular laptop, and the poor thing's occasional lapses had probably just been caused by heatstroke.  So I took the back off and removed the great wodge of accumulated felt which was blocking up the vent, and lo! Cool, quiet, reliable loveliness ensued.  Olé! indeed.  I don't really understand the cause of the boot failures, but it's been perfect ever since I cleaned out its cooling system.

But the real problem is that it's a 32-bit computer.  It still does everything I need to do, perfectly well, but since the computing industry feels impelled by the mythical Moore's law, all new computers switched to 64-bit busses a few years ago.  Not that it's made any noticeable difference to most people, except that you need twice as much RAM.  But now software people have joined in too.  I use SpiderOak One for end-to-end encrypted, "no knowledge" cloud backup, and it stopped working today.  It can't connect to the SpiderOak server, because they changed some certificate or something, and the fix is to upgrade the client software to version 7.5.  But the most recent version available for 32-bit Linux is 7.2!

So now I have to get a new computer, just to be able to back the stupid thing up.  Bah!  And now that I'm retired, (for three years next month, amazingly) I will actually have to buy it myself.  Shocking.

Obviously when I say new computer, I mean old computer.  I don't need a new computer (even though the lovely Jackie has tried to encourage me to get what I want.  She seems to think that by merely spending more money on hardware, my computing life could become more peaceful.  I'm pretty sure that's not true, but it's nice of her to be so generous).

And so, in a fit of almost impulse buying, I've ordered my next machine.  It's a Dell Latitude E7450, with an Intel Core i5 5300U 64-bit processor and 8GB of RAM.  They came out in 2015, so quite up-to-date really.  It joins the server, Jackie's laptop and my music computer in the 64-bit fleet - the kitchen laptop and the one in the garage are still 32-bit machines, but that's OK because they don't need to be backed up.  But I have had to front up actual money for it - in this case, a  whopping £210 (plus £14.75p shipping).  Ouch!

Still, if I get another three years out of it, that works out at about 20p per day.  All things considered, I think it's worth it.

A 32-bit computer

A 64-bit computer

A dinosaur guarding my memory sticks, while the wooden parrot who oversees the pens looks the other way, framed between computers