Good and cheap

One of my e-mail accounts was getting clobbered with spam, upwards of 150 pieces at a whack. The reason was that a while back, in order to enter a comment on a Web site, I stupidly agreed to let it access my Facebook account. I have since disabled the application platform on Facebook, and that seemed to have fixed the problem [perhaps not!]. I wanted to add a comment to a Consumer Reports list of favorite laptops, with the assumption that being logged into my CR account would let do that but, no, it requires the FB integration that I no longer have or want. So I’ll post it here instead.

At this moment I am working on a HP Pavilion 14-ab166us notebook computer. It is running Windows 10 on a Hyper-threaded, dual-core i3, with 6GB of memory, a 1TB 5400 rpm hard drive, and a DVD reader/writer, with the Cyberlink Power MediaPlayer included, so I didn’t have to bother downloading it for $15 from the Microsoft store.

So far no problems. Screen resolution is only 1366×768, but that’s fine, as I’m more concerned about color and gray quality anyway, which was why I bought an X-Rite ColorMunki Display for $150 a couple of years ago. The only significant compromise is this particular HP won’t do 5GHz Wi-Fi. Bluetooth works great for external speakers, and the internal B&O speakers are much better than the ones in the Acer netbook that the HP is replacing.

Staples had this notebook on sale with a $50 rebate (that HP has confirmed it’s processing), taking the total price down to $330 — which, for me, is the right price for a general-purpose machine these days. A few months ago I bought a Dell mini-tower from Staples with a quad-core i5, 8 GB of memory, and a 1 TB 7200 rpm disk. That deal came to only $300! Staples may be struggling as a company, but they have been beating Amazon on computer deals.

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