I have owned a laptop for some time. I bought it for the next time I go into hospital. Hospital is leadenly boring to me without computer access. And I have now got the laptop set up so that I can use it as if I were using my desktop machine.
But I find the screen a bit small for my old eyes and I greatly dislike the limited keyboard. For use at home, however, those limits are easily bypassed. You just plug in a USB keybord and a USB Monitor and use those instead of the ones inbuilt to the laptop.
Like a lot of things however, doing it is not as easy as it sounds. The keyboard was no problem. I got one from Jaycar, (who have a shop just around the corner from me), plugged it in to a port on the laptop and it worked perfectly. The monitor was the problem.
I had an old VGA monitor and wanted to plug that in. Problem: The video output from the laptop was in the modern HDMI format. No problem, I thought. I dropped into Jaycar again and bought a video converter. It didn't work. It worked using Joe's laptop but not using mine. Joe spent a lot of time messing about trying to get it going but no luck.
So we gave up the fight, put my VGA monitor back in the garage and went to JB Hi to buy a HDMI monitor. We got one for $148, which was very reasonable. It was a small one at that price but I was using it at close quarters and the HDMI was crystal clear so that was fine. I now use the laptop a lot more comfortably.
I note that Officeworks no longer advertise desktop machines. It is all laptops these days. So maybe I am in fashion to get the usability of my laptop maximized.
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