When we came back to the Island I purchased for my daughter a cheap Asus Vivobook to use to complete assignments and such for high school. As the requirements for the laptop were simply to have the ability to login and complete work in Google classroom, I didn’t want to invest much in the way of hardware. A Mac was certainly out of the question, and I had little faith in Chromebooks.

When my son started to use a laptop running Linux and I was taken back by the price of a new Mac for myself (and their then faulty keyboards), it seemed briefly that we would be an Apple free household for the first time since I purchased a Mac Classic, via a Long and McQuade payment plan, many years ago.

My purchase of a new MacBook this past July nixed that trend, and now a call from Combat Computers has likely killed that idea for some time.

Her Vivobook was slow at the best of times, but lately the cursor would always continuously spin, not allowing access to the startup menu and preventing me later from accessing utilities. I couldn’t even boot into safe mode and the processor was always at 100%.

As my knowledge of Windows PC’s is about zero I took it to combat computers for repair and they just repeated back the same result I had but with the added opinion that the soldered on memory was likely damaged. Nothing can be done they say.

And thus ends my flirtation with cheap hardware running Windows.