Much talk in this thread about laptops. Did you people all start with one?

Trevor

Looks like he has an agenda Bill. As well as the Tiscali, he says They could have an Epson inkjet printer it would be useful. (Epson printers have 5 or 6 separate ink tank cartridges) Yeh! Yeh! And tiny tiny apertures for the ink that clog up if you don't use it all the time. Hideous drivers and photo software, and minutes to be ready for use after you switch on. Unless you have to clean the inks, or replace them.

Canon or HP are far better. I prefer HP just because I have always had them, apart from the Epson that I literally took to the tip when it finally decided to jam completely after 4 months and the estimate was �60 to look at it! As I'm well over 60 myself it wasn't worth the hassle of trying for warranty as I didn't want a replacement Epson. Epson themselves didn't want to know, they just said take it to their local repair centre - who quoted the �60.

I started with an English Electric Leo III. Didn't own it, just a programmer!

Remember Hal in 2001 A Space Odyssey? Well he was a Leo III. The talking was a spoof, the best you could actually get was single-note tunes.

Yes my first inkjet was an Epson and a nasty POS it was too. Nozzles kept clogging up, and when printing a web page, if it had any graphics on it, the drivers appeared to treat it all as a graphic so I'd quite often get the top half of a line of text on one page and the bottom half of the same line on the next. That got binned and I went for a HP Deskjet which 4 years on still prints as good as the day I got it.

Regards,
Steve

i have an epson r200, had it for maybe 3 years with no problems, i always buy fake inks at about �1/each, never jams, drivers are ok, paper feed works, only gripe i have is the cd drawer (prints onto cds) needs a gentle push to feed, and it is a bit slow to start, and noisy...

Yes my old Epson made a racket as well now that you mention it. My dilemma is now that the Mrs wants an A3 printer for her photography and the Epsons seem to get by far the best reviews, but my previous experience with the brand is very off-puting.

In reply to:

---

I started with an English Electric Leo III. Didn't own it, just a programmer!

---

With input from a card reader you would spend more time getting the reader going than inputting code!

Ours had a paper tape reader, no cards. Seemed fine.

I was amazed the first time I saw that running, seeing the tape spewing out at a ludicrous speed whilst going through an extremely large and complex, and brilliantly cleverly-written, data-vet program.

We have some Medions at work in Sainsburys, they look ok for the price, I think they are a bit more than �300. But you are correct, you can get some nice budget machines for �300, not worth getting tied up to a long contract just to get a laptop.

Better than their Amilo ones then, because they are awful