Who wants to give me advice?

[liv]

I want to buy jack a Go set or at least some stones for Christmas. I can Google as well as the next person, but do you happen to know a good shop or website for this kind of thing? My budget is up to about £50 and I'd like to get a set that's either unusual or nice. Nice seems to be doable, as I've seen plenty of glass and a few stone stones within a sensible price-range, but I can't find anything very original. Probably I'll get a cheap, portable board, rather than a shiny wooden goban, as those guys are lovely but too inconvenient (as well as too expensive, mostly).

I need to buy a new computer, and I'm 99% sure it needs to be a laptop and about 90% sure it needs to run Windows, sadly. The question is, how much money and hassle is it worth to get WinXP rather than Vista or Win7? (If you want to try to talk me into Linux, please feel free; at the moment I'm running almost no Microsoft programs, but I do use quite a few that only work under Windows, most notably Adobe Photoshop.) And do you know a good, reputable but not too pricey source of laptops with obsolete OSes? I'm actually quite happy to buy from those little geek outfits where they custom build something for you, but only if it comes recommended.

I know I can get a perfectly respectable, powerful as I can imagine needing, laptop for £350 if I am ok with Win7, or £500 if I insist on XP and getting it from Ebuyer, whom I trust. I have found cheaper, for example this, but I am not sure buying a computer from eBay is a good idea. My eBay radar isn't very good, but this looks legit and not too cheap to be true; any thoughts?

Do any of you happen to have a photo of me in which I look relatively professional and sensible? I need to add one to the department website, and all the photos I have are either dreadful passport photos, or photos of me at a party, with loose hair and bare shoulders. I'm not embarrassed by those, but they're probably not the thing for an official work website. This is awkward cos mostly people take photos of me when I'm dressed up and having a good time, not just sitting around looking normal!

The usual question: any advice on broadband? I will probably need to get some kind of package deal with a landline as well, but this is not absolutely necessary. I want unlimited downloads, but don't care about speed at all. Cheaper is better than expensive, but I am willing to pay something of a premium for reliability. I don't need TV, but I'll take it if it makes the internet / telephone thing a lot cheaper. A joint deal with mobile broadband as well would possibly be attractive, but I don't care about stupid freebies like games consoles or netbooks.

Since Orange have mucked me about with my mobile phone account, and lied to several other friends just to get them to sign up for a contract, I'm somewhat averse to Orange. My preliminary enquiries are causing me to lean towards TalkTalk; any experience with them? I have tried using online comparison sites but found that they confuse the issue by quoting the "special" price for the first three months rather than the real price, or quoting the price difference between landline only and landline + broadband, which is no use if I don't already have a landline with that company.

Comments

[403]

Just out of curiousity, why is WinXP a requirement, rather than just any version of Windows?

[liv]

Not a requirement, a preference, and part of the point of this post is to try and get a feel for whether this preference is actually sensible. I do not want to use Vista because I have heard nothing but bad things about it. I am reluctant to go to Win7 because it's so new; it sounds as if they've fixed a lot of the problems that Vista had, but Microsoft always release things too fast, and I am almost certain it'll be better once they put out a couple of service packs. Plus a lot of software hasn't had time to adapt to Win7 yet; I looked up the Adobe site and it seems that Photoshop, which is my main motivation for bothering with Windows at all, will "probably" run under Win7 but they can't guarantee it as it hasn't been fully tested.

Also, it looks to me as if Microsoft is heading in the Mac direction of making something really pretty and shiny, but an absolute bind to use for anything that doesn't fall within what their market research expects the typical user to be doing. Plus, it's a matter of what I'm used to; it sounds like there were more than cosmetic changes with the most recent versions of Windows, and I don't want to waste my time retraining my habits.

[403]

I have XP running on one laptop, and Vista on the other. So far, I've found Vista to be every bit as stable and usable as XP. Vista changed some user interface stuff (control panel rearranged, sidebar added but can be turned off, alt-tab behavior tweaked somewhat), and I seem to recall reading that Win7 keeps those changes, but I haven't tinkered with it myself.

The only thing about Vista I truly dislike is the clumsy handling of administrator status. Even when logged in as Admin, it requires specific permission to change certain settings or perform certain file operations. It could really use a utility to smooth that out, particularly if the user knows they're going to need admin rights beforehand.

My suggestion is to find someone who's got a Vista or Win7 computer, and use it for a while to see whether there's anything that you really can't stand.

[karen2205]

I still really like Thinkpads as laptops, though they're not going to come as cheap as you'd like. Windows Vista seems useable, I've got it at home and we now have it at work on some of the machines there. It may be problematic if you need to install software on it that's a bit odd (for me, Sage comes into this category).

Broadband: Zen (my ISP) + A&A (very geeky ISP, used by some friends, with IRC support).

[woty]

Payday games makes a very nice folding wooden Goban that's reasonably priced. It's folding and magnetic, not with a hinge, so it doesn't have an annoying bump.

[liv]

Thank you. It looks like they're Pentangle in the UK, and it was Pentangle that I'd already identified as being the most helpful and appealing looking shop.

[hatam_soferet]

I just bought a Dell that had free Win7 upgrade from Vista. That was all right, but it's definitely more designed for movie-watching than working; the screen shape is extremely landscape, and it's taking a lot of getting used to. But it was affordable.

[liv]

Oh, so you did manage to get that upgrade sorted out in the end, then? Glad to hear it! more designed for movie-watching than working sounds like a big negative to me, and if you actually can't change the screen ratio that's possibly even worse. I have a decent salary these days, I think it may be worth paying £100 to £150 to get an OS that I trust.

[smhwpf]

You could try the , who have a range of boards and stones on offer.

(Ex- well, occasionally still current- Go player).

[liv]

Good thought, thank you. They do have some nice stuff, but I think it isn't quite going to be worth joining the association in order to buy from them.