Unexpectedly, impulsively even, I decided to dip back into the laptop market, in part to get something that would run some decent DTP and PDF software. Who knows, I may look at Scrivener for my writing? Inevitably, this pitches me, at least first up, into the Windows world, arriving when version 10 has had some time to behave itself.
I bought a Lenovo Ideapad 330s Midnight Blue, with a 1080p 14″ screen, 4GB of DDR4 RAM and a 128GB SSD.
On the whole, it is a nice laptop, though I need to get myself used to the more limited battery times. A claimed 6 hours feels a lot less when I am busy multi-tasking and browser tabbing. I’ve bobbed in a 128GB MicroSD card to synch my Google Drive storage with. It’s currently busy writing away to the card, so I’ll have a full back-up with me wherever I go.
Anti-Virus is another world I must re-explore. So far I’ve loaded Kaspersky’s free version, recommended online. We’ll see how long I survive.
Affinity Publisher Beta is loaded up and I’m starting to scour for useful looking software. In the end I will need to decide if I am staying with Windows and investing in some non-free software, dual-boot or sanding off for a clean Gnome shell with Ubuntu. There is just an issue with the track pad at the moment, which can be addressed with some kernel splicing that I don’t fancy struggling with.
Anyway, a bit of a departure from the effortless Chromebook experience. Tux looks on unimpressed. I may need to appease him soon enough…