I bought a new laptop this evening in eBay.

It is a Toshiba Tecra, 12.1" screen and dual core Intel CPU.

My old laptop only has 512 MB! And it is no good anymore to transport around (no battery, broken connectors).

Its was so hard to find a laptop which suits me. Most good one's are expensive, or are too heavy to carry around. Or they are just powerless- just small subnetbooks only good for SNS and email.

I want to use a few kinds of softwwares and while they work on 512 MB laptop, I really can not move it around anymore + it only has one USB 1.1 port. Just one! It is slow for SD card, means it takes 10 minutes or more for a card with a few Gigabytes.

The Toshiba laptop is so good because it is very slim, and 12.1" is just between 14" laptop and small Acer Aspire One.

It will be a lot of work to make the new laptop ready for use.

So maybe you wonder- what has this to do with language? Well my old laptop is a bit patched up since the USB is broken there is a cable and a small circuit board and non-technology people actually get scared when they see it. The chance to pass through the airport with this one are nearly zero.

To find a suitable laptop was actually not that easy! I spent several evenings and nights.

It is an used laptop but not stolen- they are refurbished from a bank + they have more than one of these. From a private seller you never really have a guarantee and in the U.S., about 8.6 percent of all laptops get stolen! It is ridiculous and buying an used laptop is a high risk.

Refurbished laptops from leasing contracts are risk free- you can clearly see if they have not just one or two, but 30 or 50 of the same laptop/desktop. Chances are they have not even been used heavy duty (means the hard disk crammed full with software). I have a special software which actually can read the hard drive how many months it has been spinning.