No post today, as I’ve been wrangling a bargain mid-range (i5 CPU) £90 Microsoft Surface Pro 3. For use mainly as an ebook and entertainment touchscreen tablet.

This was Microsoft’s flagship 12″ product from nine years ago and accordingly built like a tank (though considerably lighter). I had it in nice condition from a reputable UK refurbisher, and on arrival it turned out to be almost un-used. Nice. Just 222 charge cycles on the battery and only 2Tb written to the Samsung SSD (they only need replacing around 125Tb). That’s ‘little old lady user’ good, though various clues make me think it was lightly used in a U.S. school’s IT lab for a few years, before being part-exchanged back to Microsoft. Probably been in a warehouse ever since.

So… many thanks to my Patreon patrons, since your regular PayPal has eased this fine upgrade to my armchair reading.

Hours of wrangling it into shape today, not least due to chopping off the manic tentacles of the eldritch Windows 10, with only an unfamiliar touchscreen (a bit like tackling Cthulhu with a machine-gun). But it’s done now, and thus I’ve broken free from the increasingly annoying and flaky Amazon Kindle 10″ tablet (2017, when they were subsidised and thus dirt cheap) for a better 12″ tablet with far better colour and far more user control — since it’s running the full Windows desktop OS. Though I can still see/read my purchased Kindle books via read.amazon.com. The online Kindle reader is vastly better than their dire Windows desktop app, and I’m pleased to find it can also even do ‘guided view’ for purchased comics.

I might still put Winux 7 (Linux Mint that looks and feels like Windows 7) on the new SP3, but it’s too early yet to say. I also need a suitable pen (and perhaps a keyboard-cover called a ‘type cover’), in order to write notes on the screen. But I do like to get bargains, so I’ll wait until I can find a cheap one.