That was different.

I run a nice machine (by my standards) here in the homestead. It's a Dell Latitude E6410 laptop, and it cost me a few hundred bucks two years ago. It's not a gaming machine, it's an email, surfing, facebook and media transcoding device.

Yes, I grab music or video from online sources and transcode it.

Don't you?

I recall that in 1992, because I am an old tech geezer, that I bought a 386 machine, a number greater than 286 which must have been better, soon to be be passed by a 486 the following year.

The 386 cost me $4800 with a printer. That's 1992 dollars, and with inflation at say, two percent, that equates to around $7800 in todays money. I needed that 386 to justify a tax return that year, and of course a more important reason.

I needed to play Doom!

That was different, I admit, but today, if my trusty E6410 becomes very unhappy or dead (which it is showing signs of) well I will just have to jump on to eBay and buy another, and the question is, what are they going for at the moment?

Well, the first hits on eBay for the i5 version (sold items) are around $80 to $115 for one that is working and that's about the price of admission to my level of acceptable tech.

However, a respectable Dell Core 2 Duo, or C2D, can be had for half of that massive price tag and will do everything (besides the video transcoding) in a reasonable timeframe.

Five grand down to fifty bucks in twenty five years, does that screw up Moore's law?

How to get a great deal on an Xbox One (Early 2016)

I've recently gone through the "upgrade" from the Microsoft Xbox 360 to the now almost two year old "next generation" console, the Xbox One.

This post is to detail how I went about buying the new console as cheaply as possible and the entire research process took a month or so, so here are the nuts and bolts in a five minute blog.

This is a Canadian blog, so all amounts are Canadian dollars.

It's not a difficult path, but finding the so called "refurbished" units on the Microsoft store isn't as easy as you would imagine. The most direct way was to google it and then proceed from there.

It intrigued me that the base unit was a penny under $320 and the unit with the Kinect sensor was just $30 more. The units came with a current free game and the Kinect version added a one month Xbox live offer. The customer reviews were glowing.

If you continue to follow this blog, you will see that I use eBay a lot and I use the sold item search feature on the site to find out relevant information about market prices on tech and games.

It made sense to buy the Kinect version, even though I did not want the sensor, I also chose the most current and most popular free game that sold well on eBay. The following numbers all include taxes if applicable and the shipping on the unit was free.

Refurbished Xbox One with Kinect, Just Dance 2016 and 1 month Xbox Live.   $391.99

The numbers from my sales on eBay include any fees.

Kinect Sensor           $65.76

Just Dance 2016       $29.26

The free 1 month of Xbox live never arrived, so Microsoft gave me a $10 gift card.

So, my next generation unit cost me a total of $286.97 which is pretty good if you think that stepping into any of the electronic superstores or Walmart in Canada would extract $391.94 from your wallet, although some may say that it was a lot of effort to save $104.97 but that's fine as it's my money. I encourage you all to go spend your money as you wish and keep our economy going!  

I hear what you're thinking.

The great reviews on the Microsoft site are obviously filtered, but customers say that their refurbished unit was like new, and my experience was the same. The console, kinect sensor, headset, controller, free duracell batteries, cables were all pristine and had that new console smell and experience. The only indicator it was refurbished was the box of course, and a big sticker on the unit that was easily removed. I could not find a scratch or flaw and my thoughts are these units are new and it's a Microsoft marketing strategy, just a way to entrap us cheap buggers into upgrading.

I plugged it in, it started downloading and upgrading the forked Windows 10 software and a mere six hours later it was ready and raring to go, all I needed was a next generation game to play...

I'll review the console at some point in the future.