New laptop for the family

John's been talking for some time now about getting a laptop for work. We've been keeping an eye out for reasonably priced laptops that would suit his needs but nothing has really stood out as price worthy. Most of the sub-grand lappies were all criminally ugly and horribly ill equipped to handle the ubiquitous plague of Windows Vista.

Finally managed to hit pay-dirt this weekend on an impromptu trip into Harvey Norman while we were out doing odd jobs. A Compaq Presario was on offer with enough grunt to run reasonably and wouldn't scare away the aesthetically sensitive. In fact, at $950 it even outspecs Gemini in some areas, and I paid considerably more than that a little over two years ago. Ah, the life of a technology enthusiast.

Fueled by the excitement of our purchase, we invited ourselves over to John and Sheena's for the night on Saturday so that I could set the new machine up and give John a quick walk through with his new machine.



John was suitably impressed by the electronics disclaimer, in four languages to boot.

I spent most of the afternoon, and probably half of mum and dad's download quota, setting up the machine. It's disgusting how much trash HP and Microsoft have installed by default, most of which are obviously trial versions that are meant to entice further purchases. Being the cheapskate that I am, I promptly removed these to install FOSS equivalents. Well... maybe just free...

• Open Office
• Picasa
• Skype
• AVG Antivirus
• Chrome

Alison and I then subjected John, who was very patient, to a basic but thorough tutorial in computer use. I think he did very well and I'm sure he'll be making good use of the computer in no time. Might need to find a free typing tutor for him to speed up his chicken pecking though. :)