Friday, 29 November 2024

How am I doing all this?

I'm doing this entire online module using a lockdown laptop, the Geobook 2E. These were supplied to school and college students during lockdown for 'remote tuition'. Apparently, too many were manufactured, and the surplus units sold off relatively cheaply. I picked up mine for £99 from Amazon, which was a good deal. The specs aren't great, but are just about adequate for light undemanding tasks. It has a 12½in display, 4GB RAM, 64GB disk space (with another 64GB file storage using an optional microSD card), three USB3 ports, a mini-HDMI port and an Intel N3450 CPU. The almost obligatory Bluetooth, WiFi, webcam with microphone and (poor) speakers completes the package. It came with Windows10S Education installed but I managed to upgrade it to Windows 11 Pro after a bit of fiddling with the registry. I get Office365 with Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, OneNote, Skype, Outlook, etc and 1Tb cloud storage using OneDrive through the OU. 

From time to time, like all underpowered computers, it runs a little slow, and a Windows reinstall helps speed things up a tad. I had a bit of a quiet period with the module recently, so I took the opportunity to sort it out. I also set up a backup routine that automatically copies my assignment files once a day to the SD card and copies the whole course files once a week to the cloud storage.