Well the long shop has had some more bargains for me. A dubious value Acer Aspire 2920, in itself not a bad looking or functioning laptop, although someone has snaffled the bottom access panel off it for some reason (boggle) Otherwise she's fully functional save the missing optical drive, no great loss.
The battery is also knackered or powered down so far its not waking up for the
charger. I've never had to play with laptop batteries previously but its possible to wake up Li-on by giving them transient high voltage.. just enough to spike a bit of charge in there and then the regular charger will do its thing. But haven't figured out the terminal on the battery yet to try it.

And a pair of LCD monitots. A Benq FP92W, which is nominally lower than my regular pair at 1440x900 in place of the 1660x1050 and an LG W1943 which while pretty much the same physical size is only doing 1360x768... On the plus side they take up considerably less space the the originals, if these are 19" then the my regulars must be at least 24" also their white values are a lot closer than my other pair too. So while not really an upgrade, they do make a nice pair. I'll have to have a crack at 3 way picture one of these days.

Spec


*** THE READER V4.50 [freeware]
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* Origin: Scrawled in haste at The Lower Planes (21:3/101)