When new, laptops are awesome. Then you decide “this lappy isn’t 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 more than once.
Recently a news article described people donating old laptops to tech firms, who upgrade, update and clean them and send them to families struggling to home-school through the pandemic because they have no home PC.
The orange Sony Vaio
This got me thinking about an old orange (yes, orange) beast of a laptop hidden somewhere around the house. I bought it in 2013 while studying for my degree in Computing Information Systems. It’s a 14″ Sony Vaio with Windows 7, an i5, Radeon GC, a 300GB hard disk, and I think 5GB of RAM. In 2013 that was a proper c’puter!
Try it yourself
The orange Vaio quiz
Test what you remember about the laptop.
Giving it a second life
This machine hasn’t been turned on since around 2017. Once its clock was reset, it was business as usual, as if it had just had a coffee. Windows 7 fires up in around 30 seconds, which is amazing for its age. Right now it’s getting a Windows 10 upgrade.
Bring out your old tech and upgrade it, either hardware or software, you might be surprised.
The only downside, and no, not the orange case (get past it!), is the battery. It lasts 59 minutes fully charged. Against the lightweight laptop supplied by work, it has only about 10% of the battery life. That’s a shame for something that was once the centre of attention, not because of the orange, but because of its spec.
Try it yourself
Software fix or hardware limit?
Decide whether each point is something software can improve or a limit of the hardware.
What I learned about buying laptops
So what’s the point of this post? You could say it’s just reminiscing, but it’s more than that. It shows that if you pay a little extra and do some homework on a laptop’s spec, you get something capable for much longer than something cheap. This wasn’t an expensive laptop when I bought it, and it wasn’t a gaming powerhouse. It was a shrewd purchase: a red label from John Lewis at around £500, in the right place at the right time. I saw past the orange case, which really grows on you, trust me, and was rewarded with a cracking screen size and a true laptop legend. At least it is in the circle I walk.
When people ask me for advice on their next laptop, this experience sends them to John Lewis to look for the red labels. It really is one of the best tech purchases I’ve made. With the power cable in and Windows 10 installed, this old tech feels like new tech.
