[Marcus Rowland]

Another Pentacon 1.8/50 M42 mount (with a crappy Praktica body that's headed for spare parts heaven)
A Canon EF 28-90 f4-5.6 - silver so less popular than the black ones, unfortunately
A Prinzflex 3.3/200 PK manual mount
and a real weirdo, a Sigma x1.6 Minolta MC to Minolta AF teleconverter/adapter with auto focus (on Minolta 5000, 7000 or 9000 AF only) and stopdown. It's working OK on an old 5000 body with the 58mm 1.4 Rokkor I bought recently

all of them working, total spend £37 which ought to make a reasonable profit - the teleconverter/adapter thingy is listing at over £100 new!

---------- Post added 05-12-18 at 07:21 AM ----------

A NOS DELL laptop for my stepdaughter, on which I then spent about 2 full days setting it up (on Win 10 - Grrh!) but which then proved to have a faulty USB3 port - so now waiting for a replacement from the supplier tomorrow, and then I will probably have to spend ANOTHER 1-2 days setting that up

When I was a lab technician my school bought about 200 Dell laptops for student use etc, within a year about 1 in 4 was faulty in some way. Usually a busted keyboard, which is down to the blasted kids, but we also had faulty ports, drives, screens, etc. - I forget exactly how many, but one thing's for certain, I will never buy a Dell for my own use...

---

Last edited by Marcus Rowland; 05-12-2018 at 07:27 AM.

[Canada_Rockies]

When I was a lab technician my school bought about 200 Dell laptops for student use etc, within a year about 1 in 4 was faulty in some way. Usually a busted keyboard, which is down to the blasted kids, but we also had faulty ports, drives, screens, etc. - I forget exactly how many, but one thing's for certain, I will never buy a Dell for my own use...

A company I contracted for in the USA in the early 2000's bought nothing but Dell computers for the reliability. My wife's elderly Dell PC (not laptop) has had no problems other than those the operating system caused. Her 23" Dell monitor works flawlessly.

Is it laptops only, or is Dell heading down the "cheaper is better for our bottom line" road? It would be a shame if that happened. Dell has been a good company for a long time.

[Racer X 69]

A NOS DELL laptop for my stepdaughter, on which I then spent about 2 full days setting it up (on Win 10 - Grrh!) but which then proved to have a faulty USB3 port - so now waiting for a replacement from the supplier tomorrow, and then I will probably have to spend ANOTHER 1-2 days setting that up

When I was a lab technician my school bought about 200 Dell laptops for student use etc, within a year about 1 in 4 was faulty in some way. Usually a busted keyboard, which is down to the blasted kids, but we also had faulty ports, drives, screens, etc. - I forget exactly how many, but one thing's for certain, I will never buy a Dell for my own use...

A company I contracted for in the USA in the early 2000's bought nothing but Dell computers for the reliability. My wife's elderly Dell PC (not laptop) has had no problems other than those the operating system caused. Her 23" Dell monitor works flawlessly.

Is it laptops only, or is Dell heading down the "cheaper is better for our bottom line" road? It would be a shame if that happened. Dell has been a good company for a long time.

Dude, you're getting a Dell!

[monochrome]

A company I contracted for in the USA in the early 2000's bought nothing but Dell computers for the reliability. My wife's elderly Dell PC (not laptop) has had no problems other than those the operating system caused. Her 23" Dell monitor works flawlessly.

Is it laptops only, or is Dell heading down the "cheaper is better for our bottom line" road? It would be a shame if that happened. Dell has been a good company for a long time.

I have a year 2000 DELL Tower that is currently my ADSL Modem / WAP handler still running WIN XP Pro (it is hard-firewalled from the internet and I never access the web directly from that machine). There doesn’t seem to be any reason to replace it. Was originally my 34 year old daughter’s homework Desktop.

---

Last edited by monochrome; 05-12-2018 at 12:44 PM.

[Marcus Rowland]

I think a lot of it is down to educational purchasers buying the cheapest system that will do the job, but that said the quality of the laptops we got circa 2008 just wasn't very good - it felt like they were designed by a committee as a lowest common denominator laptop, there were no features to make them stand out and a not very complicated start up and log in could literally take four or five minutes, even if nobody else on the site was using wifi. Just wasn't impressed.

[Arjay Bee]

Here at my institution the central purchasers provided 60+ Dell 5450 laptops to staff in 2016. We have had more than 20 of them experience a short circuiting failure where the power socket attaches to the PSU. Goes without warning. Fixed under warranty with no loss of data but disconcerting for the user and disruptive while waiting for repair. Have Dells at home - towers - no problem.

[monochrome]

I’ve always bought IBM / Lenovo road warrior laptops and high end Dell towers. My company has 75,000 Dell laptops on docks with wired mouse, keyboard and speaker and dual 23” monitors. Drop the laptop in the dock and everything is connected. It’s the repetitive plugging and unplugging that breaks the connectors.

[UncleVanya]

I work for a fortune 500 company. We have used Dell, Lenovo, HP, etc. All of them have lemons and superstars. Each time we change it is based on a bake off. No brand is better in the hardware. Buy based on support and ease of interactions.

[Wasp]

I have seen a lot of Dell laptops with the rubber gasket thing around the screen peeling off. I had one like that myself, in fact. Apart from that, there were no issues with it.

Currently I have a Lenovo. It is very powerful but a bit heavy. There is a payoff for the weight - long battery life.

[Cerebum]

Ok, after the Centon 500mm mirror lens, discussed elsewhere, I lost 11 ebay auctions on the bounce! Is it me or are old lenses becoming expensive? Anyway, one I did win was a new in box Pentax A 35-80mm for £13.13 not massively exciting but that’s pretty cheap and it may be fun. My best acquisition of the day though was a manual, multi coated Cosina 135mm f2.8 mint in case that I bought on a whim for £12, gave a perfunctory test, was unmoved and shoved back on eBay for £10. I was talking to one of my camera oracles who referred to it as a “nice lens”, at which point I whipped it off sale and gave it another look. It is nice, really nice and, don’t tell the wife, but it is actually quite exciting!

[jtkratzer]

Bummer to go pick up a kit at a good price to find the 8-element 50/1.4 has a bad scratch on the rear element towards the center of the glass. Ended up passing on the deal as that lens was the primary item I was after.

[Boris_Akunin]

I just won an auction on ebay for this (with a very good price):



It's a Thinkpad x230t, the convertible version of the normal x230 with an active digitizer under the screen. Lenovo discontinued the t-models after this one and their new consumer grade convertibles are no match for the build quality and versatility of the old ones. It not quite as sturdy as my old x200t was but it'll take a lot more abuse than current models.

With 12GB of ram and a 275GB SSD, there's no urgent need to upgrade (though there's still room for an mSATA SSD). The CPU's a bit old but it's a 35W model (Sandy Bridge i5, don't know what exact model, it should have 2.5-2.9GHz base and 3.1-3.6GHz Turbo) and still plenty enough for most things. This config. would have cost ~1800-2000€ in 2013 and I just paid 350€ (including a fresh battery & a docking station)

I'll only be acquiring it for a few days until I hand it over to my brother as a workhorse for his new job as chef de cuisine, there is probably some rough treatment and a hot and humid environment in it's future.
The only more rugged options (e.g. Panasonic Toughbook, Dell Latitude Rugged) would be a lot more expensive, cumbersome and less capable.


I fairly happy with my own t440s (I replaced the trackpad with the one for the t450s of course, the buttonless one was just [expletive deleted] unacceptable) but I miss the build quality and easy maintenance of the old Thinkpads. The hot-swappable battery that they introduced with the x*40/t*40 series is great (though those morons have phased it out of the t4*0s line again) but other than that I want to go back to the time when Laptops didn't need to be thin and shiny.

I'd happily add ~1cm to the thickness of my T440s if that space was filled with thicker/more sturdy materials and extra battery...

[Marcus Rowland]

A day for weird stuff:

A Hoya 28/2.8 in PK mount in a Canon Eos adapter - unfortunately the idiot cut back the stop down lever of the lens so it is no longer usable on Pentax bodies with open aperture!
A slide duplicator - usually sell reasonably well - boxed and with a PK T-mount and cap.
And a Sigma 180mm/5.6 AF macro lens that I thought was for Pentax but it isn't, it's about the right size but there's no screw thingy - haven't identified the mount yet, I think it may be Sigma's own mount.

I paid £13 for the three so hopefully will make some profit if I can identify the Sigma and check it works - I may hit a couple of camera shops and ask for help. Or if anyone here knows it..?

[Boris_Akunin]

haven't identified the mount yet, I think it may be Sigma's own mount.

Yep, that's definitely Sigma SA mount, here's another SA mount for comparison:



Few camera stores will have an SA-mount camera on display for you to test the lens with but the chances of finding one somewhere in London probably aren't too bad.

[pepperberry farm]

an HD DA 35mm Macro Limited...