Take That Look Off Your Face, I Can See Through That Smile.

DV3E4333, originally uploaded by http://andrewskelton.net.

I’ve been told many times that I have a Poker Face when it comes to giving things away, but you must be able to read the look on my face at the moment, Dear Reader. After writing yesterday’s missive, I had a follow on task to complete on my old machine… to order a new one. I’ve mentioned before how the old one, which has for many years performed faultlessly and faithfully but of late has had a number of hardware errors that just won’t go away without further expenditure on new components. As the machine is getting a bit long in the tooth, I decided I really needed a new computer and started looking at various solutions (don’t get Dara O’Briain start on Computer Solutions!). Whilst I stand by a statement I’ve made for years, that a cutting edge desktop machine will always be faster than a cutting edge laptop, it’s the convenience of the latter that has me forsaking my desktop in place of a mobile equivalent (to sit alongside the plethora of other mobile “solutions” I own including numerous old laptops). I was galvanised into action by a TV advert for a Samsung laptop for sale through PC World and after numerous trips to various stores I was ready to make a purchase but something was stopping me (the wife!). I’ve owned various Dell machines for around 16 years now and they’ve always been well built, well specified and lasted me a long time so I decided to see what I could see on their Outlet where returned machines or cancelled orders are resold – I’ve had machines from here in the past for a fraction of the price as well. Whilst looking on the Outlet I decided to see what offers were available in the main store and after looking at various business grade laptops as well as their mass market machines, I concentrated on their XPS range which have dedicated GPU (graphic processing units – or graphics cards to us old Skool techies) essential for photographic work. There seems to be continual offers on the Dell website, but the one that finished yesterday for an XPS 17 seemed too good to be true saving a whopping 43%. So after much deliberation (ie constantly nagging my wife), I went to purchase the machine after I had written my blog – however before I was about to hit the submit button on the purchase I did a quick search, as I usually do, to see if I could find any money off vouchers and to my surprise I immediately found what appeared to be a 10% coupon. I entered the number into the respective section of Dell’s web page not expecting much but was rather taken aback when nearly £80 of the purchase price (before VAT and Delivery were added). Now if I could earn £80 for 5 minutes work hour, then I’d be laughing.

Overnight, the order has been processed and the payment taken, the progress being displayed on a web portal that I can access by logging into Dell’s website. I’ve been like a kid in a candy store all day, checking the site to see if any progress has been made, and got all excited when the status changed from “Pre-Production” to “In Production”. Of course I’m now refreshing the page like mad hoping that “In Production” changes to “Shipped” – it would be perfect to take away with me to use during my training course at Dartmoor Zoo this coming weekend. Now if I can order some fine weather for the weekend as well, I really will be laughing.

Advertisement