Geek Porn 3.0

Back when the original Asus Eee launched in the UK – I snapped one up as soon as I could get my hands on one. The specs were… terrible. It was immensely satisfying to have for all of an hour before the novelty wore off and you realised that the tiny screen, cramped keyboard and poor ability to render flash actually made for a terrible user experience even if it did have 9 hours of battery life and was very convenient to carry around. Ultimately it just wasn’t very good.

It was the first laptop I’ve ever owned, and only on the basis that I had convinced myself that it wasn’t a laptop. The idea of paying a premium for compact technology that can’t come close to rivalling their desktop brethren in terms of performance and satisfaction irks me substantially you see. A netbook however is cheap and doesn’t pretend to try to do what a desktop does. A netbook doesn’t pretend that you might be able to play games on it and it doesn’t pretend to be portable whilst actually being heavy and cumbersome, especially when you have to carry a 2Kg charger around with it which is even more awkward to carry around.

As netbook technology has progressed, they have become less shit than the original Asus Eee which was undoubtedly terrible. In fact they’ve evolved into something mildly decent. However, there is a price to pay for this progress. Good netbooks now roughly cost the same as a low-mid weight laptop, but at a vastly lower spec and ability. So having kept my eye on the netbook market for well over a year to dip my toe into this world once again, I was disappointed to find that netbooks are the new laptops. They are the highest tier of evil with regards to price to performance.

This got me thinking. Now laptops were the lesser of two evils – maybe it was time to take another look at them seriously. Naturally, I was drawn to the Dell website where I found this beauty which is an Studio Inspiron 15. The specs are below – and in my eyes were impressive for the money.

Having spent a great part of the last 6 months researching e-commerce practices dedicated to increasing the value of online transactions and indeed informing the architecture of an insurance e-commerce platform with this in mind – you would think that instantly I would be looking for ways to ensure that I was getting the best value I possibly could. Sadly this experience wasn’t what spurred me on my search for a cheaper price – it was in fact the words of a budding social media strategist from New York called Rosie Siman who mentioned over Thanksgiving dinner that she didn’t buy ANYTHING these days without looking for discount codes online.

So I went out into the Deep Web – and looked. Eventually I found a Dell specific affiliate site that offered discounted Dell equipment. What this site does is link to exactly the same computers that you can buy directly from the Dell website – but slightly different models which don’t automatically include the bloatware you usually get when you buy a manufactured computer. So instead of being forced to pay £90 for 15 months of Mcafee’s Antivirus – you just get a £90 cheaper laptop. When I paid £587 inc VAT instead of over £700 – I smiled and thought of you Rosie.