Headline November 13,2012/

''GETTING THRIFTY
EVEN ON A BARGAIN HUNT!"

Only last week a friend retired his Laptop and bought a new one. The retiree I am told, was a three year old MacBook which had just just gone out of warranty. As long as I remember, this was the first time that this old miser, ever had the same Laptop all the way through its life cycle. Hahaha!


Speaking strictly for myself, I'd rather gouge my own eyes out, then ever buy a Dell again. Dell is simply and plainly, out of my life, forever! .But my own story I will cover some other time.


My buddies old Laptop didn't get to retirement unscathed -the keyboard, the optical drive and the hard drive had all died and been replaced enroute. I remember all that happening very vividly It was becoming a little bit like the legendary shovel that has changed the blade and handle and shaft but is still notionally the same!! Hahaha!



Its replacement is a shiny MacBook Pro with a 15in screen. He had come around, and got wiser over all these years, to feeling that ''size does indeed matter very much''. To put it differently, he started to out think these smart marketeers.He then reached a point where he rather schlep a large heavy Laptop than tote a tiny elegant one that he could not see.


What's unique about his old Laptop is that it isn't obsolete at all. Every other computer he had ever had stopped being fully functional before he got rid of it. He took action when he discovered he needed his computer to  do new things that the computer couldn't do. It soon became a familiar process, which started to happen within about a year,and became truly annoying around 18 months later, and always ended up with him  getting rid of the of the darned old model and buying a new one at around 2 year mark.


Not the time before the last one though.In 2006 his computer still did everything he wanted it to do. It helped that he was not a graphic jock:He don't manipulate large images or do any desktop publishing of large files or images, so his needs were fairly old-skool, limited to word processing, surfing the net, listening to music, and so on


It was just about then, that I came onto the scene and got into the act. What all this suggested to me, was exactly what the genius physicist at MIT, Luca Turin  -and incidently, one of the world's best perfume critic- had been saying since long:

''Moore's law had basically stopped for Laptops!'' Moore's law is the formula named after the Intel engineering legend, Gordon Moore, which states that computer chips either double in power or half in price every 18 months or so. But the process has now, for practical Laptop purposes, reached a limit. What this means from the buyers point of view is, that issues of screen size and portability are now PARAMOUNT - you are one of those graphics jocks.


My other piece of advice, that I hope to cover in the next post, could easily help all the students from all the worlds, rich or developing. It can be summed up In just one word: Refurbishing!


With many thanks to !WOW! 

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless