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Showing posts from July, 2021

The $99 laptop

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  I believe computers have, for some time now, been more powerful than many of us actually need for day to day use. There's a lot you can still do with a 10 or 12 year old laptop as long as you don't want to play games or do complex video editing and buying a used laptop can offer much more performance than new single board computers like Raspberry Pi's. Dell used to produce two ranges of machines, the Inspiron and the Latitude, the former intended for home use, the latter for enterprises. In terms of headline specifications between the two they were pretty similar and even shared some internal parts, but the Latitude was always more expensive on a like for like basis. The main reason for this was the chassis, which tended to be made of higher quality plastics and support for a desktop docking station. This higher build quality along with readily available spare parts helped enterprise IT departments to keep the machines running. Due to the sheer number of machines produced