Wednesday 27 July 2011

Richborough Power Station, the demise of a local landmark, laptop replacement and a general ramble.


OK I suppose it is an ugly concrete structure, but I suppose we have got used to it, plans are to demolish it in September or October.

The inner sanctum of engineers reckon this will be a tricky job, one of the cooling towers has to be demolished with explosives before the chimney. If you don’t get the demolition of these just right they tend to twist and go everywhere, careful arrangement of charges and det chord is critical.

At the time of writing the date for the demolition hasn’t been set.

I keep a sketch book like Turner did, unfortunately there the resemblance ends, but I have used a sketch to illustrate the post as I know aspiring art critics will all have a mental picture of the power station and immediately have modifications.

I was on the far end of the western undercliff promenade on Monday when my children spotted what looked like diamonds in the adjacent caves, so I sketched the power station while the climbed down and retrieved what transpires to a sea worn house brick, now a prized position.

I finally got to grips with the time I have been wasting blogging on my ancient laptop and decided that either I replaced it or stopped blogging. I opted for a replacement laptop, so this may be cause for celebration or regret.

The trouble with buying new technological items is that it is very difficult to try them out first. With laptops the snags that the various people I know have seem to be, too heavy, no camera card reader slot, irritating fan noise, overheating when resting on ones legs – probably due to all the vents being where the legs go, no usb3 socket, the operating system being Linex, short battery life. Built in mouse that is effected badly when you type, supplier problems when things go wrong, no webcam

Anyway I shopped around and bought the following laptop: Acer Aspire 5750 Laptop, Core i3 Sandybridge 2310M 2.10GHz, 4GB RAM, 320GB HDD, 15.6" LED, DVD±RW, Webcam, Windows 7 Home Premium
price £315.81 or £388.80 inc vat.

I bought it online from Ebuyer.com, I opted for Acer partly because I had tried an older model belonging to someone else and partly because they were very good when one of their products went wrong, and Ebuyer because they have sorted out problems in the past and I have bought from them in the past without problems.

OK I am not saying that this is the best deal around or anything like that, but so far, last 24 hours it is proving to be an excellent computer and doesn’t seem to have any obvious snags.  

4 comments:

  1. was only talking about the cooling towers this weekend and now they are to go. I like ebuyer had stuff in past and always been OK.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I bought a simmilar spec Acer from Argos last october for £400 but it came with an Acer 3yr cover.
    Mine also came as many do now, with MS Office 2010 starter but the Acer recovery disc creation program does not include this on the recovery discs.
    I got fed up with the ads on this version of office so I have installed my old Office 97from win 98 days.
    If you want to keep your laptop legit and you have children take a look at software4students.co.uk and you can get ms office 2010 pro for less than £40.
    I thought there was a catch but my grandson has their product installed ok.

    ReplyDelete
  3. 19.47 I have to admit I uninstalled the virus checker and other, use for a bit pay later programs, that came with it.

    This is my personal laptop and I have bunged the legit programs that I bought for the old laptop on it, mainly office 2000 home version.

    I am using AVG free virus checker, which has proved to be excellent in the past.

    It is still so far so good, but early days, the battery life is amazing compared to anything I have had before and I am making myself get used to the built in mouse pad, having disabled the double click when you press on the pad as unsuitable for clumsy old men.

    As time goes on one gets less and less in terms of really free software when buying a new computer and I think I may have to buy an imaging program. At the moment I am using Gimp as I haven’t looked through the various disks and licences.

    ReplyDelete
  4. what are you talking about they blew them up already...

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ujsADzIMmI

    ...fake, of course. :)

    ReplyDelete

Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.