Life Let's mark time again. For the past eight months, after my last desktop conked, I've been persevering with a laptop connected to a monitor, keyboard and mouse, which long term readers around these parts will know has happened before. At least a years worth of the RTD era of Doctor Who was tapped into a old school Compaq netbook with an Atom processor running XP, not to mention much of one of the annual reviews.
Anyway, that trusty Fujitsu was becoming increasingly slow and even a slight memory boost, double the 4gb, was only a temporary fix. Computers just get old and this was taking three or four minutes to start up and keeling over with more than five or six tabs open on Chrome. Spotify was slow enough to be unusable to the point that I unsubscribed and moved over the Amazon Music (not that I'm in a hurry to switch back). Time and tide.
This is now being typed into a HP Elite 8300 SFF Quad Core i5-3470 3.20GHz with 8GB of memory and a 256 GB solid state hard drive (my primary storage is a connected external disc). Despite being (a) refurbished and (b) being originally manufactured in 2012, it's the fastest machine I've ever used. Thanks to the SSD, start up takes seconds as does shut down and apps load almost instantaneously. Web pages appear super fast.
There's nothing more to it than that, there isn't some amazing story here, other than that buying refurbished hasn't so far been the disaster that some sites suggested it might be. The label on the top says Windows 7 but it's running Windows 10, but other than that it feels brand new. About the only upgrade I'm considering is an extra graphics card but frankly since I don't play new games, I can't yet see what the benefits would be. Chuckie Egg plays perfectly fine.
