Do I want a notebook or a desktop?

There are a few things to take into account. Back in the UK it was a case of do I want to use the computer in more than one place and the answer to that pretty much made the decision for you.

That is still a question to ask yourself but out here you have to remember the houses in Spain are generally smaller than in the UK because we spend so much of our time outdoors, so have you got the space for a desktop.

On the other hand notebooks are usually quite a bit more expensive than desktops for a similar performance and it is more difficult to get spare parts for them, so how deep is your pocket.

Many people think that a laptop and a wireless internet connection will allow them to do their computing in the garden. A nice idea but in practise not many laptop screens have sufficient brightness and contrast to be visible in the bright spanish sunshine. Screens are now a little better than they used to be and if you really want to use a netbook / laptop outside then look for one with LED backlighting for the best results. Most netbooks have this type of screen now.

Now we have Netbooks (Small laptops with no DVD drive) and tablets ( Just the screen with a virtual keyboard) and they are getting more useful if you are using your computer mainly to surf the internet.

What ever you buy, if you buy it in spain, then make surte it has Windows 7. The reason being that 7 can be changed from one language to another without having to buy a complete new version of Windows. Any decent technician can do this for you and shouldn´t be charging more than 30€ to do it. The shops will tell you it can only be done on the largest machines with Windows 7 Premium version, THIS IS NOT TRUE!

A little horror story from one of my customers;

The customer had a Toshiba laptop that was 2 months out of the guarantee period when the motherboard failed.

Toshiba wanted £800 to complete a repair and the computer had to go back to the UK.

Had the computer been a desktop the same repair would have cost €100 as it could have been completed by me here with standard parts.