El Andalous - New Laptop

 

B. Tech - Great Shop!

I had this idea of “living the dream” when I moved over here, but as this and recent blogs show, you can’t escape admin. The dream is an illusion!

Anyway, Lena told me that she was replacing her laptop because it was five years old. She uses her laptop for work and she didn’t want it conking out on her with no backup to hand.

The more I thought about this, the more it made sense. I also didn’t want to have to buy a new one in a panic or have to work out how to retrieve the information from my old laptop. With coronavirus likely to get worse rather than better, I didn’t want to risk having to buy one when shops had to be closed or when the population was highly infected.

Laptops are not overpriced in Switzerland, so it would have been good to get one there. Never mind.

To make things easy on myself, and to reduce infection risk, I thought I’d buy one in Spinneys in our local mall.

However, Spinneys no longer stocked laptops. They’d removed that section of the store and extended their selection of fridges and washing machines.

No worries. I went to Radio Shack in the mall. Shocked, I saw that the shelves were almost bare. No mobile phones, no laptops.

I looked in the shop that sells Apple items. I really wanted a normal laptop but maybe an Apple would do. However, they all had glossy screens and I need matt if I’m to be able to work outside.

Safi kindly volunteered to drive me into Hurghada to All in One. That’s the shop I bought my last laptop from, but I’d been avoiding going into Hurghada (due to the coronavirus). Anyway, Safi drove me there. Hurghada has two branches of All in One and neither branch stocked new laptops anymore. They only had refurbished laptops. Out of interest, I asked the price of one and it was the equivalent of 1000 GBP! I didn’t want to spend that much on a new one, let alone a refurbished one. Moreover, they were offering no guarantees (and this is Egypt).

I never thought it would be so difficult to find a laptop. I suppose it’s hard to import items because of the pandemic.

All in One said I could get a new laptop in a shop called B Tech. I’d been in it before, but it had since moved location. Safi very kindly drove me there (same trip).

It is a wonderful shop, not the least because they had new laptops for sale with a variety of specs. I don’t need anything fancy since I’m mostly using Word, Excel, or the internet. My old laptop still had plenty of storage; it was just running rather slowly, particularly for booting up and shutting down. And it had the occasional inexplicable glitch, plus the USB ports weren’t operating reliably.

Anyway, I bought a new laptop, pretty similar to my old one, for around 500 quid. That was more like the price I was expecting to pay. The service was great. I had to show my passport and visa, which is a bit strange, but I guess it’s general security.

The guy serving me was so good I tried to give him a tip, but he refused (not the refusal asking to be refuted, but a genuine “I can’t take it” refusal). This is coming to be more common over here and is perhaps the start of a slow change to the culture.

I went away a happy customer.