Man in a Shed: The IT circle of life

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

The IT circle of life

[Rambling post warning fuelled by guilt at dumping old IT equipment ]

That time has come round again when its time to think of upgrading IT equipment. My business will need to do some presenting over the next year and the old Toshiba T9100 just looks too dated. It served me well ( at least it and the 3 year warranty has - returned for fixes twice ). It feels like betrayal to 'dump' in for a newer model.

Well the new model has arrived a Toshiba M9 - but the horror of turning on a LCD screen for the first time was to get me again. The infamous stuck pixel. This rather ruined any bonding I was going to be doing with the machine.

The new and the old

After some time I'm getting to like the new Laptop - though thanks to the issues of upgrading to Vista its going to be weeks before I can rely on it instead of this machine. ( I've installed VMware to run windows XP for those apps that can't be upgraded ).

At the same time my Psion Revo ( bought for about £20 of EBay) has stopped functing. Thats my fault for leaving it round the kitchen in high humidity. They have a known weakness on corrosion of contacts with the rechargeable battery. Still that saves the agro of upgrading the IR connection to take a serial connection to talk to it on the new laptop.

The last of the amazing Psions - RIP

It still amazes me that there is still little to touch the old Psion's in the market today. There was a British company that had the lead on the world and was at one point seen as a major threat to microsoft. No more - now we rely on banking .....

Normal socialist savaging service will be resumed one I've finished playing with my blue tooth mouse ! ( Its just cool. )

2 comments:

John M Ward said...: Just for information: I still have my trusty old Acorn PocketBook -- an enhanced Psion 3 -- which I take to meetings where I cannot sensibly have the big portable stuck in front of me. It seems to be going on forever...; 9:14 pm
Man in a Shed said...: Quite. My wife had a Psion 3 that she loved. We only had to replace it after she sat on it !

I'm thinking of heading over to EBay to garb another Psion5 ( mine died a few years ago after many years great service ). I think the keyboard on the Psion 5 is just fantastic for that size of device.

Now can you make PsiWin work with Windows Vista ?; 9:30 am

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The pound in your pocket

"We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists." James Callaghan

“The trouble with theoretical economists is that they don't understand that when you have a deficit, you can only finance it by borrowing, and you've got to persuade people that it's worth lending money to you and that they'll get their money back... there's no way of escaping it.” Dennis Healey during the 1976 Stirling Crisis.

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens ... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of over-turning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." John Maynard Keynes, 1920.

"To preserve [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude." Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America,1801-1809.

Inflation is taxation without legislation .. Milton Friedman