Andys Computer

  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...

  A couple of months ago I decided to replace my trusty MacBook Air with a Linux laptop. I had a bunch of requirements that I covered in a previous post , but I couldn't find any single machine that checked all those boxes. But then I remembered a machine that was released back in late 2017, the 25th anniversary Thinkpad. Truth be told I'm no ThinkPad fanboy and at launch it was somewhat overpriced for the power on offer but it does have a lot going for it at least as far as my requirements, with one feature that is practically unique. I've highlighted the specs that don't meet me requirements in red, but as you can see it's a much better fit than the machines I previously looked at : Brand Lenovo Model ThinkPad 25 Screen Size 14" IPS 1920 x 1080 Multitouch CPU Intel Core i7 7500U ( Dual Core @ up to 3.5 GHz) Memory 16GB DDR4 (Expandable to 32GB) Storage 512GB NVME SSD (user replaceable) GPU Nvidia GeForce 940MX 2GB Ports 3x USB 3.1 1x USB Type-C (with ...

  With the exception of some employer provided Windows based laptops, for the last 16 years I've only used Apple, and exclusively so with my own money. I started out with a 14" iBook G3, followed by a 14" iBook G4, then a 15" PowerBook G4, a 12" PowerBook G4, 15" MacBook Pro, 13" MacBook Pro and finally a 13" MacBook Air which I bought way back in mid 2013 and which holds the record for the longest I've kept any machine as a daily driver. But I've been considering buying a new machine for the last year and was holding off for a refresh on this ultrabook model before making any decision. The new model was announced by Apple a couple of moths ago and for the most part it was what I had been hoping for, with two major caveats... Firstly, it was only available with a dual core i5 processor. I'd prefer a quad core or at the very least a dual core i7 at a good clock speed but that wasn't the worst thing, no th...

  Windows 2000 SP4 Unofficial Service Pack 5.1 Unofficial Rollup 2 Daylight Savings Fix dotNet 2 7z 9.20 Winzip 14 WinRAR Acrobat Pro 8 iTunes 7.2 mRemote 1.50 Microsoft Office 2003 MS Office SP3 FileConverters (Office 2003 .docx support) PaintShop Pro X1 (11.2) K-Meleon 74 Goanna WinAmp 5.63 FileZilla Nero 

    Retro computing, or to be more specific retro gaming, is something of a trend at the moment. Some people are happy using DosBox to emulate old hardware on their modern PC, but some get a kick out of using real retro hardware. Old desktops can be bulky so if you're not fortunate enough to have the space for one the next best choice is a period correct laptop. A scan through YouTube shows a lot of people hunting down old IBM ThinkPads and their prices on the used market have risen accordingly. The thing is... while you do get very nice build quality (at least in terms of the casing, many models in the early 2000's had problems with failing components on their motherboards ), contrary to what you may be led to believe by recent displays of ThinkPad fetishizing, they were never lusted after by the younger demographic when they were new, primarily because their specifications were business not gaming focused, not to mention they were what I would generously descri...