A new computer

In June of 2020, I rejigged my living room.  I bought an old but large TV unit with lots of drawers to sit a TV on and and I bought a largeish new TV and and a very comfortable new sofa.  Sofa below.

I rarely watch TV so I wanted one primarily to play classical music videos on YouTube.  Watching a performance as well as hearing it does add something.  So I needed a computer to hook up to the TV.  I had an old office computer which slotted well into the TV unit so I decided to use that. Its output was VGA only and my new TV of course took HDMI only.  I circumvented that problem by buying a small converter from Jaycar.  It worked.

But recently it stopped working. When I turned the computer on one morning the TV reported no signal.   I thought at first that the old computer had finally died but then it occurred to me that the VGA to HDMI gadget might have died.  I have found that Jaycar sells a lot of Chinese rubbish these days.  And so it was.  I took the computer downstairs to the garage and hooked it up to an old VGA monitor I had there.  Everything worked perfectly! The computer was OK after all.

But since I no longer could use it to drive my TV, I had to get a new computer.  I chose one of the cheapest laptop computers Officeworks was selling - for $347.  As I just wanted it for one thing, that should have been fine.  It wasn't.  After I had gone through the enormously complicated process of getting it up and running, it ran for only one day.  Next day it would not recognize its own keyboard!  It was a Lenovo product which I had expected better of.  

So I took it back to Officeworks in a very disgruntled state and swapped it for a slightly dearer one -- another Lenovo. So I had to go through the agony of setting up another computer.   But I got it going and it has been fine since.  It's a pretty minimal computer with a small hard drive, only two USB ports and no cable connection for the router. I could have just relied on WiFi to get the internet from the router but I had a cable to USB converter so it is now something a bit unusual for a laptop: one connected directly to the router.  It should be a bit faster that way.

So I used the two  USB ports to connect the router and a mouse.  So I was up and running.  I wanted to connect a couple  of extra things, however:  A regular keyboard and a USB drive to facilitate file transfers.  I had a hub so I plugged the hub into the mouse port which made the El-cheapo computer more versatile. It now has 5 USB ports.

I was not in a great hurry to buy a new keyboard so I was a bit lucky to find a Lenovo keyboard for $5 in an OpShop. It is nice to use but is a bit non-standard in that it has some sort of proprietary keys on top of the F keys. But is does the letters and numbers as usual so that is all I want for watching videos. The laptop has similar keys on top of the F keys so I obviously have something to learn about that

The TV unit accomodates the laptop nicely -- and unobtrusively

UPDATE: Joe has explained the expanded F key identities to me as facilities for dealing with videos. Seeing that I want to use the computer to play videos, that might be useful. So my $5 keyboard is in fact completely up to date