Laptop crisis (not really radio).

If you're in the market for a nw laptop these days, you may be in for a nasty surprise.

The story began for me when my daughter was sent home from school as a contact of a positive Covid-19 case.  She's fine days later, but with the prospect of repeating school isolation periods to come, we decided to get a laptop to receive Teams lessons at home.  Sadly, this software, which schools grab as 'free' platforms from the tech giants, is not supported on the cheap and capable Raspberry Pi computers.

I thought I might find something for about £250 - which I indeed did.  Except, when I tried to proceed to buying one, none of the major stores actually had them in stock.  All that was available were laptops costing a minimum of £800 - a lot of money for something that very quickly becomes worthless, and is anyway only needed for fairly limited, simple purposes. 

Worse than the high cost of the laptops remaining in stock is the universal change to solid-state drives.  It seems that for either supply reasons, or a desire to move away from mechanical HDDs, laptop makers now only provide machines with SSDs.  Unfortunately, £800 only buys a machine with about 256GB SSD, which is quickly going to be overrun with the endless and bloated Windows 10 updates.

If you look at desktops, like I eventually did, then you can see that the concern over the size of a 256GB drive is justified: many now use a 256GB SSD for the Windows OS alone, whilst general file storage is provided by a mechanical HDD, typically now 1-2TB in size. 

But unlike a laptop, a fairly high performance CPU desktop box, with no screen or peripherals, with this much better storage, costs only £600 - or much less if you are happy with what will be for most an inconsequentially, slightly slower CPU. 

It seems the lack of laptops is the result of pandemic supply issues, possibly a coordinated change to SSDs (or perhaps a change forced by supply issues in the pandemic), and a very high demand due to people switching en-masse to working at home.  

Even if you want a Chromebook - otherwise known as the Google devices that grab all the data you ever put into them - then this will also be tough. The Welsh Government has thousands on order for those without IT resources, but can't get them delivered, forcing them to consider a special flight to get them!

Well, I bought a small desktop box, and look forward to running the new MS Flight Simulator on it shortly - oh, and letting my daughter do some homework, too, of course!