I have a laptop that I use for field trips, etc. It’s an ancient Dell which I bought from my son when it became too slow for him. The hard drive had packed up too. It wasn’t too difficult to install a new, larger drive. Getting rid of all the Dell rubbish that it originally came with was a little more difficult, but there are excellent resources on the web to tell me how. It still bears it’s stickers – Simond from Chamonix (climbing gear), Tendon (climbing ropes), etc. (What do the Cosmic logo and the yellow “S” stand for, I wonder?)
It makes me feel quite energetic when I use it (even if others find the sight of an aged, portly gentleman sporting all those logos quite amusing). Anyway, cleaning up the laptop and removing all unnecessary stuff certainly made it faster and more usable. But still too slow for some jobs, such as running a TV tuner box for capturing recorded TV programmes. So for $20 I bought a 1 GB stick of RAM. That really made a difference – I could use the TV tuner now. Perhaps another 1 GB would enable it to run Lightroom (for initial sorting and processing of my photographs). I ordered another, identical stick, this time for $26 and waited impatiently for it to arrive. Finally it did, well packaged in a nice static-proof bag.
I was impatient to install it and see it it made a difference. Hang on, I thought. Better check that I have the right RAM stick before I open up the laptop. So I unwrapped the black package. Look what was inside:
I checked the address on the package. It wasn’t for me, it was my wife’s name on the address label. This was a special gift for her from Karen Farley (who looks to have beautifult skin, by the way).
A free sample of moisturiser, a chance to take up a $39 offer and save $184.00!
Unfortunately, the moisturiser didn’t make the laptop go any better. So I’m still waiting.
