Wow! I’ve bought a PC! You may think that’s the kind of thing I do a lot but I’ve been working from home (on and off) for 20 something years so initially having a PC at home (albeit a work one) was more than most people had. That first unit was very much “mine” - it shared home and work duties.

In 2000 and a bit I went back into an office so bought a decent PC for home. Having trawled the net for the cheapest I ordered it only to have the company go bust the next day. Fortunately I got the cash back as it was a credit card order and I went for safety and bought from the company I was working for. However, it came pretty much bare bones and I had to install my own memory as well as software. That PC (a P3) with various disk (60G), OS (dual booting 98 & XP) memory upgrades (maxed out at 256M) has staggered on until now. The lack of memory being the real issue.

I’ve built PC’s out of work cast offs for various family members and ended up keeping a laptop ebayed for the in-laws but beyond their eyesight and co-ordination to use. Unfortunately a dodgy power connection on the laptop (battery was dead from day one) meant you could lose your work at any time and as it was also maxed out with 256M of memory the chances of doing anything before it died were minimal.

So I’ve bought a new laptop. New, from a shop, with software installed, legal paid for software and everything - not just some old bit of kit I’ve reformatted and put a collection of freeware and borrowings on. It took it out the box, turned it on and it worked - spooky.

And where did this ageing techie go for his hardware? Having considered another ebay purchase, having price checked the company’s staff discounts and special offers, having perused the many el cheapo sites I’ve squirreled away over the years my arcane knowledge took me to….

..Tesco.

Yes, my local supermarket had a good basic laptop for not much over £300 (£329 but double points traded up gives me effectively another £25 off that and you can get a £10 off on line purchases). http://direct.tesco.com/q/R.207-0318.aspx is not quite what I’d have chosen given days to pore over specs but it was close enough to both the price and performance I had sketched out in my head and easy to get hold of and to take back if it was DOA that it was a no brainer in the end.

If you’d have told me 25 years ago I’d buy a laptop along with the weekly shop….