I was thinking of buying a bigger camera backpack. I went into town on Saturday to look at some and found the Lowepro Fastpack 200 for £65. It looked pretty good so I came home to check online prices and Amazon had it for £50.35. It took me a while to realise it didn't have a laptop compartment like I thought it did.
Not important because I didn't have a laptop, but it would have been useful for magazines and other papers. The next one up, the Fastpack 250, had a laptop compartment but was £61 on Amazon. It's the same as the 200 but with a slot for laptops. The bigger one, the 350, was £62 on Amazon. Then I found out the blue 250 is only £54. But the 250 is designed for 15.4" laptops while the 350 is for 17" laptops.
So I measured my sister's old laptop, which I've pinched off her. The screen is 15.4" but the outer casing from corner to corner is 17".
I'm going to take the laptop into town today and pretend I'm interested in buying from them. The 250 is £75 in Jessops, so obviously I'm going to save myself £21 by going with Amazon.
My sister's laptop - she bought a new one to replace it because it was making a loud grinding noise, was very slow and kept crashing. I found it, put a new 5,400rpm hard drive in and put some oil in the fan that was making the noise. I used my desktop's OEM Windows XP disc but used the licence key from the sticker on the laptop. Hey presto! A perfectly good laptop, albeit with fairly old specs.
It only takes about 45 seconds to finish booting. With the old 4,200rpm hard drive it took a couple of minutes. I'm going to buy a 512mb stick of memory because the graphics takes up 128mb of the 512mb that's in there. It's a P4 3.0GHz, 512MB RAM, now with a 120GB 5,400rpm hard drive, Ati Radeon 9000.
~James, The King Of Waffle.
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