Rhemaranch Blog

I remember buying my first laptop; it was a second hand Apple Powerbook, which cost me £1,000 from ebay. It had, for the time, an unbelievable spec - 1Gb of RAM, a dvd writer, Bluetooth and wifi built in, the latest operating system. I had struggled with desktop PCs for around 7 years and finally decided that, dammit, I wanted to sit in my favourite armchair and browse the web; I wanted to drink coffee at the kitchen table and shop for holidays. What I needed was a laptop.

So, just a few years later, what would I need to spend to get a similar laptop? I don’t want a cheap no-name one, I value brand name quality. I need Windows Vista and the 1Gb of memory that is essential to run this powerful operating system. I want to burn my home movies to DVD and backup all my documents week after week, so add a DVD-rewriter too. Of course the whole point of a laptop is freedom to surf and work from anywhere you choose, so wireless internet (’WiFi’) must be included.

Having worked out what I wanted, it was time to work out how much I’d have to pay. As we all know, computers just keep getting cheaper so I set off expecting to find something pretty good for around half what I had paid previously - £500 should be a good deal, right? I started looking for the best laptops out there at this sort of price, and it came down to 2 or 3 - the Lenovo (aka IBM) ThinkPad R60, the HP nx6325 or the Dell Inspiron 1520. The HP only came with 512Mb of RAM, and the Thinkpad only had WiFi as an option, so in fairly short order I decided the Inspiron was the laptop for me.

This is when I got the best surprise I’ve had for quite a while - I was searching on the Dell laptop to make sure I’d chosen well, and what should I see? My laptop, for free! My scam detector went haywire, yes, but upon further inspection it does turn out that you can get a premium Dell Laptop, the Inspiron 1520 for free. Admittedly this is part of an offer from a company called Mobiles.co.uk, who are bundling the laptop with a new contract mobile phone, but when I looked into it a bit more it turns out they’re a genuine outfit, owned by Carphone Warehouse and with a pedigree of offering freebies ahead of the game (my friend got a free Nintendo Wii from them ages ago).

Seeing how my mobile phone was due a replacement anyway, I chose a new Sony Ericsson mobile phone with a free laptop from them, and saved myself £500! Bargain!

Filed under: Technology