When new, laptops are awesome. Then you get to the point of thinking “this lappy, its not what it was, I need a new one“. A few years later you find the once loved tech stuffed in a cupboard, this has happened to me on a few occasions.
Recently there was a news article where individuals were donating old laptops to tech firms who upgrade, update and clean PC’s and send them out to families struggling to home school through the pandemic, through not having a home PC.
This got me thinking about an old orange, yes orange beast of a laptop somewhere hidden around the house. This laptop was brought in 2013 when studying for my Degree in Computing Information Systems. It”s a 14″ Sony Vaio with Windows 7, i5, Radeon GC , 300gb hdd, and I think it has 5Gb of ram! In 2013 that was a proper c’puter!
This machine hasn’t been turned on since 2017 ish, and once, it had its clock reset and seemingly had a coffee, it was business as usual. Windows 7 fires up in around 30 seconds, that’a amazing for what the year. Right now its’ being treated to a Windows 10 upgrade.
Bring out your old tech and upgrade it, either hardware or software, you might be surprised.
The only downside to this lovely lappy, no not the orange case (get past it!), is the battery. It has 59 minutes at fully charged! Put that against my little lightweight laptop supplied from work, and this thing has only a 10% battery compared to that. That’s a real shame for something that once was the center of attention, not because of orange, but because of its spec.
So what’s the point of this post? Well you could say its’ just reminiscing, but its more than that. It shows, pay a little extra, and do some homework on the spec of a laptop, and you will have something that is more than capable for longer period of time that something cheap. Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t an expensive laptop when brought and wasn’t regarded as a true gaming powerhouse. This was a shrewd purchase, a red label from John Lewis, around the £500 mark. It was being in the right place at the right time. I saw past the orange case, which really grows on you trust me and was rewarded by a cracking screen size and true laptop legend. Well it is in the circle I walk.
When people ask me about advice for their next laptop purchase, the experience with this laptop means I send them in the direction of John Lewis to seek out the red labels, it really is one the best tech purchases I have ever made. Right now, with the power cable in and Windows 10 now installed, this old tech feels like new tech.