My position as an IT consultant has given me an birds eye view of laptop lifecycle, a continuous process where a laptop goes from birth to death. The full cycle usually takes about 5 years, which means the average human being will own about 12 laptops in their adult life.

We can draw many parallels between our own lives and that of a laptop. They come in many shapes and sizes, some are small and thin, others are fat and heavy. Some will catch diseases (malware), others will die young (hard drive failure). A few lucky ones will grow to be old and extraordinary slow.

Fortunately the life of a laptop is much less precious than that of a human. Eventually there is a strong enough driver to go and find a new laptop. Experience tells me that the first factor 95% of people consider is price. For example, a large majority of the population want to spend less than £400 (including VAT) on their laptop. Understandably, in tough economic times people want value for money, and even the big manufacturers recognise there is a market for cheap laptops.

However, the market has undergone a substantial squeeze in order to accommodate this price bracket. It might surprise you to learn that the main reason a laptop can be offered so cheap is that many large software firms have effectively subsidised it by paying the manufacturer to have their software pre-installed. This gives the software firm a foothold over their competitors. This is the reason you’ll often receive a free 30 day antivirus subscription. A lot of people will simply renew the product without shopping around. For the software firm, it only takes a small percentage of people to buy their software for the initial investment to pay off. This is just one example. Typically a cheap laptop will come with at least 10 preinstalled unwanted applications – every single one is a revenue generating opportunity for the software firm. To an experienced eye, these unwanted applications can easily removed, but usually people find it hard to identify the wheat from the chuff, and besides they don’t want to spend 3 hours removing software from their brand new computer.

The second most important (and expensive) consideration for a lot of people is Microsoft Office. Your £400 laptop certainly won’t come with bundled with a free copy. In fact you may even cry when you discover this software costs more than a quarter of the total cost of the laptop. There are cheaper Home and Student editions available, but beware these editions only contain the basic applications, such as Word, Excel and Powerpoint. For business you usually want Outlook and that comes at a higher price.

This brings us to another business based consideration. Cheap laptops arrive with a watered down version of Windows. Be warned, this will not work well with a typical business network. The reason being that Microsoft removed several features that allow the computer to be part of a business environment. Most businesses need a laptop with the more expensive Professional version.

People often overlook the core components which go into a laptop – the most significant being the processor. It’s easy to be drawn in by offers of large amounts of storage and memory. Remember that these are upgradable components, where as the processor is not. Within the sub £400 price bracket you can expect to receive a very basic processor. It will likely be produced by AMD who dominate the lower end of the market. The speed (measured in Ghz) is often advertised but this is of limited importance. This makes comparing different models difficult. Generally Intel processors offer as much as twice the performance for around an extra £100. This should be a strong consideration as it could mean the difference between a laptop which runs smoothly over it’s lifetime and one that doesn’t fulfill that dream.

In conclusion, a cheap laptop is often a false economy. The £400 laptop exists to feed a market of people who only vaguely understand what they’re buying. The truth is the cheapest laptop is unlikely to satisfy. Unless you are seriously strapped for cash, go for a more expensive laptop and you will enjoy a better experience over a longer period of time.

In other news, I’ve been working on some new features for the ever popular PHP Unserializer! It will now give you the option to make changes to your data and put it back into a serialized format. Currently it only works with arrays that don’t have any sub-arrays, but I will gradually expand it to cover these too. We hope it’s of some use.

Secondly, Henry has installed a new theme. It’s only one from the WordPress Themes catalogue, but a very nice one at that. We could really use a nice logo for the top left now, and possibly a change of name too?!

I’d like to take a moment to thank Chris & co at Kernow broadband for providing a dedicated internet connection for the camera. Stefan at Davey electrical provided his cherry picker on which we mounted the camera. Without the fantastic help of these people the camera wouldn’t have been possible!

We hope to be back next year to provide even better coverage of the grounds.

The camera will be capable of panning a full 360 degrees and will be positioned some 30 feet above the showground. The live stream will be viewable for the duration of the event on www.showgroundlive.com

We hope you enjoy the show, even if you’re not there!

Day 1 – Set off at 5am from Exeter, having stayed the night at Reg’s flat. I was trying to convert his Navman S30 to run TomTom – However it took 5 hours, so I didn’t actually get any sleep at all. We set off and I managed a whole 30 mins before handing over to Reg. By 9am we had made good progress, scooting around the edge of London. Then, disaster, the low oil light came on in the car. We pulled in and bought some oil for a quick top up which seemed to fix the problem. In no time at all we were queuing for the ferry. We were way to early so had to wait about an hour and a half. We finally boarded the Norfolkline – cheap but very impressive inside. We left at 12pm, The sea was flat and the crossing was very smooth. Unloading the ferry took a while and we were soon getting used to driving on the right hand side. We forgot to fit the GB sticker and headlight adapters, and passed some police looking extremely uneasy. We pulled in as quick as possible to get the stuff fitted.

We soon settled in to doing about 80mph with the cruise control on. Then a bright flash, what on earth was that. It looked like a mobile speed camera! No! I’m sure I was sticking to the limit, and I had just been overtaken by a french car going faster than me. I don’t know what it was.

Arriving at the resort we were met with stunning views of the alps. There seemed to be a major lack of toilets so we stopped to make some yellow snow. About 15 mins and we were there. It was snowing and the roads were icy. We parked up and soon found the car became stuck. We had to fit the snow chains to make any progress at all.

Check-in took a long time but we paid the 300 euros deposit and picked up the key to the apartment and lift passed no problem. We also picked up the snowboards, and paid an additional 10 euros insurance for the week. We entered the apartment and wow, it was way above expectations.

Day 2 – Very keen to get on the slopes. We soon found some green slopes and went down for our first real run. Ouch, lots of falling over and high speed crashes. I fell off the drag lift. We went back for lunch and then went for a much larger green slope. This was impressive and took about 2 hours to complete, by the time we reached the bottom we were ready to call it a day. My leg was already hurting quite a lot. We returned to the apartment and soon went out for some drinks with the polish.

Day 3 – Keen once again, this time aiming a bit higher at the Jandri express. We met up with the polish and went up Jandri 1 and Jandri 2, right to the top. Then we took the underground train to the very top. The run down was amazing, but my leg was seriously hurting and walking was very painful. Jay realised the camera had gone missing, so he went back with Reg to look for it. I stayed at the 3600 cafe and shared a jug of wine and some potato thing with the polish – yum.

We took a chair lift back up, and Kasia was super scared having never been on one before. As we got off she managed to punch me in the face and I heard a nasty cracking noise in my face. Seems like I got away without a broken nose.

We made our way down to about 2600 and then it was getting late, so we took a big cart (technical term) down and then the tiny white lifts. Reg took his board in for repair after the binding broke.

So what’s required? Well today’s box consisted of:

• Dried cranberries (small portion)
• Americas nut mix (almond, pecan & brazil nut) (medium portion)
• Fresh crunchy apple (large portion)

I’d welcome any more suggestions and I’ll create a list.

December 2008 – Foot burn.

This time I discovered the hidden danger in making a cup of tea. Having completed the perfect pour I dropped the kettle onto the cups, causing a catapult effect whereby an entire cup of boiling water landed on my foot. It looks quite bad, the skin started falling off straight away and various blisters developed overnight. Initial pain was probably 7 out of 10 but overall only  3 out of 10 (with the right treatment). Recovery time is estimated at 2 weeks.

December 2008 – Coccyx damage.

Snowboarding can be huge amount of fun, the sense of speed is great but as a beginner I found there was a fine line between extreme fun and massive pain. Ski runs are rated by difficulty, green is easy, blue is intermediate, red is difficult and black is extreme. As a beginner I naturally opted to try out a difficult “red” slope. I soon found the gradient of the slope was massive, which made it all too easy to pick up speed. The surface was very hard ice rather than soft snow. I fell at speed onto my tailbone (Coccyx) and ever since sitting down has caused me quite considerable pain. I’d rate the initial pain as a 4 out of 10 but the after pain is a definite 6 as it hurts almost all the time. Recovery time is estimated at +6 weeks.
October – 2008 – Achilles heel.

Running is great exercise and I found I could sleep a lot better after running a mile every day. I kept up a regular run on the treadmill nearly every day. However, I made the mistake of not wearing shoes. This resulted in an unsupported foot and ultimately a very sore Achilles heel. Initial pain was very low, only a 2 out of 10 but I made the classic mistake of ignoring the pain until it got worse. Overall a 4 out of 10 and recovery took 8 to 10 weeks.
June 2008 – Bicycle Crash.

Cycling is of course great exercise too! I thought it would be great to try out the cycle tracks at Haldon Forest Park in Exeter.  I tried some of the normal cycle tracks which were great, but I wanted more. The best on offer was a track rated “severe”- “A highly technical trail for experienced riders with the right bikes and protective equipment.” I defiantly didn’t have the right protective equipment and probably had the wrong bike – the rear tyre blew within the first minute of setting off. Having replaced the tyre I managed a further 30 minutes or so before entering a steeply banked corner way too quick. The track dropped away and I went straight over the bars, forcing my face into a collection of mud and rocks. The result was not good, my face was badly scratched. Luckily nothing was broken (apart from my sunglasses which must have saved my eyes). The pain was bad, probably a 5 out of 10 and the recovery time was quite long – at least 6 to 8 weeks and the scars live on.

May 2007 – Ear damage.

Unlike the previous incidents, this one wasn’t an accident. Some Plymouth scum decided to attack me, landing an unprovoked punch to my right ear, splitting the cartilage and causing a large amount of swelling. The pain was an instant 9 out of 10. Recovery was very slow, about 8 weeks before the pain subsided, although I don’t think my ear has fully recovered, I estimate a 10% loss of hearing in that ear.

So that concludes my accident prone year. I can confirm that thankfully I remain in one piece, all be it a collection of broken pieces!