The girls’ dad brought them yesterday to the nearest DFA office to apply for their passports. He gave them a new laptop that his brother bought in the US—and I know that is going to be the nexus of future arguments between the twins. So I pushed through with my plan of giving one of them my Lenovo laptop while I upgrade my pc-on-the-go with higher specs, like a Ryzen 5 or Core i5 and 16GB of RAM. I drove to the nearest SM Mall with a Cyberzone to check out Acer notebooks—because their service center is less than 1 km from my house. I’m practical like that.

I was vacillating between a 15-in Ryzen 7 laptop and a 14-in Core i5 with an all-aluminum body. I should have gone with an OLED laptop because battery life is around 8hrs but I wasn’t prepared to shell out PHP 60k right there and then because I have to be midful that I’m flying to HK early tomorrow. You know, I may not be able to keep myself from buying stuff there…

What sold me on the smaller Core i5 was that its SDRAM is already DDR5 and has a slightly higher battery capacity compared to the 15-in Ryzen 7, which only had DDR4 SDRAM. My mini-desktop at home is already DDR5 and I don’t think I can go back to anything older than that. While it’s all-alumimum, this Acer Aspire is still lighter or as light as my current Lenovo and thinner than other comparables.

I spent 5 hrs setting up my new laptop and transfering files from the old one. What slowed me down was that the Win 11 Home version this machine has is the old 22H2 version, the support for which had ended in October 2024. I had to scour the interwebs to learn how to upgrade it to 24H2 because the automatic Windows update doesn’t work if the support has ended. It needed some workaround and the download and installation was bloody long. Finally, at 12:30 am, I was able to receive the regular Microsoft updates.

I also had to upgrade my laptop before flying to HK because last year I had a hell of a time finding a workstation that doesn’t use Type C USB to hook up to the company system. Our IT guy there was flabbergasted why I was issued an old laptop. I said, this is my personal equipment because remote workers don’t get office-issued equipment. This also works well for me because you can’t do much with office-issued laptops and phones since you are prohibited to use USB drives and download unauthorized stuff on it. They can also monitor every move that you make through that machine and they can also take away your files in an instant when you are put on garden leave.

Anyway, because we searched high and low for a workstation that can accommodate USB A connections, our IT guy was short of telling me to buy a new laptop, just out of frustration. Well, I didn’t have the same problem with our Singapore office… 🤷🏻‍♀️

Actually, I seldom use laptops even when I am traveling to Manila because it’s cumbersome to lug around when I literally chase people (or even do a body slam to hold off elevators). I bring a laptop when I know there would be heavy editing involved or when I travel to places where I know I will have a workstation e.g. Singapore, HK or hotels/resorts. Otherwise, it’s always the tablet for me since it’s light, its battery life is longer so I don’t need to look for coffee shops with power outlets, and it’s quick to fire up. But my Samsung tablet is such a pain to use when editing because our company IT system reads it as a mobile device, therefore, I cannot copy-paste from our emails to any other application, such as MS Word on Android. I had to use the internal MS Word app and save it to the company cloud, which is very messy. They claim it’s for security but damn, it’s so painful when you’re on you mobile phone/tablet. My workaround to this fuckery is to email the piece I’m supposed to edit to my gmail and I edit from there. After I’m done, I email it back to my office email then return the piece to the journo. You ask why can’t I just edit on Outlook? Outlook for Android doesn’t provide HTML options like changing font color and text style—features that every editor needs. I had to use MS Word for that. I use red font for editing, so that the journo can easily see which parts were modified. This is the equivalent of “red marks” when editors  did their thing on paper with red ink.

Anyway, I’m PHP 30k++ poorer since I made a straight payment. Straight or cash payments can give you significant discounts.