Cheap Laptops Birmingham, Liverpool and Newcastle
posted October 21, 2009 - 5:29amThere are thousands of people in Birmingham, Liverpool and Newcastle who are in need of cheap laptops. The second city has a high percentage of computer owners but this hides the fact that many others are without computers because of the relatively high cost. A couple of years ago the idea that basic laptops would be made available for less than £100 was well received.
Laptops costing £100 would be bought in huge numbers by parents for children – the peers of which have had computer access all their lives – whose education would greatly benefit. Cheap laptops could also assist the unemployed look for work, find it and then apply for it. What chance do handwritten applications have against those professionally produced with the help of Microsoft programs.
There are bargains to be had. We’ve seen laptops advertised for £165. There is also the possibility (though not ideal) to buy refurbished models. When dealing with private dealers don’t forget you can barter in some instances and make your best offer.
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Comments
Your Comment put my article to shame
Thanks for that my fat fingered (not really) friend but, like I've indicated in the title, your comment does put my article to shame...
My first calculator was left on my desk and my current one was removed from the rubbish in my daughter's bedroom bin - good enough for me.
My first computer was an Amstrad but it got me through my first degree even if it printed out essays all underlined (user error). My second cost £1,700 and was state of the art for about two hours. I had that for 8 years though. This I use now cost £300 from Tescos (a UK supermarket).
Where are the £99 laptops we've been promised? Have they vanished before they were launched like indestructable CDs?
Thanks for the comment
AndAnotherThing2 writes COMEDYand is Xomba's first featured HISTORIAN
People my age and older also want inexpensive computers.
I've been building, using, programming, and trying to catch-up with new computer hardware for more than thirty years. I do not credit Microsoft with real advances, although they have the largest share. But that is be cause of my own stupidity in dealings with Bill Gates way back when. Computers were by then not new. PC's were. IBM kicked off the PC world, trying to keep the Apple Kids out of the market.
The Chips were around for a short while, all the tiny 8-bit stuff, before they began finding their way into useful products for a public. I held off buying a hand-held calculator because their prices were coming down and their capabilities were going up. One of my wealthier colleagues in the early 1970's bought the first handhel electronic calculator Sharp sold -- for over $400! [Hey those dollars then were worth a lot more then than the Wall Street and Bank Racket ponzi schemes we now have.] All that old calculator would do then was 16-digit math. Add, subtract, Multiply and Divide -- and if you do not know how to use a slip stick of wheel slide rule you will hardly understand science or engineering of the era. That Sharp would only display 8 of the 16 digits. The rest were in memory, but you had to jot down the first eight and press a button to get the rest of the sixteen digits.
My science work at that time required rigorous accuracy to as far into it as you could go, and a seven place log table was a real helpful short cut. Even with that Sharp you could quickly manipulate the log values and arrive at a pretty good answer.
For all students of practical applied theory and the performance of science, the observations and measurements are the path to real understanding and science. NASA's develoment of the Space Program, began on the slide rule, was good to three places, but the program needed more than three places. Logs were used. Finally, using the first computers meant millions of line of good proven code.
My first real personal-computer, was based on a Z-80, had 4K total -- and with a tiny powerful BASIC that directly supported access to both machine code [00100010], assembly code [mov] and regular BASIC code at the time [GOTO, FOR, NEXT, IF, SUB, RETURN] It was a Bally. I had 1800 bytes for programs when the 3.2K language was laoded. What an education!
I type so poorly because of fine finger control problems, fat fingers [not really, just clumsy fingers. . .] that even when I am "done" I am not really "done."
My first calculator was a Texas Instruments,[$189.95] but then I got an HP-programmable or some such [$120] with reverse polish notation kind of programing and calculation steps and my first contact with Bill Gates was a two day adventure, trying to get their $500 FORTRAN compiler to work for particular transcendental functions.
I had to write around their problems and Bill was never customer oriented.
Should NASA use Windows? ABSOLUTELY NOT!!!! NASA's Code works. It does not hang or crash.
Inexpensive computers could be given good jobs with the correct interfaces -- like scheduled work, repetitive but necessary.
+10
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