posted on Tuesday, April 24, 2007 8:54 AM
by
Endie
Ever-So-Sensible New Cars and Computers
In a horrific week for the domestic capital budget, I have so far bought a new car and a new computer. I can only assume that I shall round the week off with a new house, or perhaps a second hand Sea Harrier or the like.
Anyway, despair not, bank manager! For, just at the point where Dragon slams headlong into his mid-life crisis, I get over mine and jump straight to my middle-aged spread. It is a tragic fact that I have never really been interested in cars. Not real cars. Ones on Project Gotham 3 are great, because I can do fun things with them. But all I do with them in real life is drive them at 30mph around town or 70mph in very straight lines. And believe me that a Z3 does not sit easily with a wife, a dog and an regular second hound. Or rather, the wife does not sit easily: not when the footwell is, as often as not, shared with two growing collies. It is a tawdry and saddening fact that, much as I enjoy putting the roof down, I only bought the Z3 on the spur of the moment one morning, mainly to alleviate the boredom of re-coding a pension administration system.
So today I picked it up, having tried out 2 land rovers (Unreliable? The door-warning electrics on the first one 2-year-old Discovery failed during the test-drive!), a Rav4 (cramped but nice and punchy), and an X3 (puhlease) I got a huge, practical and utterly mundane car. Today, after I picked it up, the hounds wandered around the rear luggage area, far enough away from me that I could see their mouths open and close almost a second before the bark reached me.
Re the computer, it is a Dell XPS210 with dual core processors and 4Gb of ram, 19" flat screen monitor, massive disk and more stuff like that. "Endie," I hear you say. "How can you claim that purchasing an overpowered dragster of a PC like that from Dell's performance range is in any way sensible?". Well, gentle reader, breath easily. I costed it on Dell's site and it came to just a shade over £1400, but I bought it through Dell's ebay outlet for well under half that. The Dell factory outlet is a cracking thing if you are happy with eBay and know what to bid for stuff: usually it's been built for a customer but has a scratch on it. Since my computers sit in movable mountings so I can wheel them about to wherever I need them, a fascia scratch is essentialy invisible.
Fear the piercing gaze of my economical eye.