Four years ago, my laptop was infuriatingly slow. So I made one of the best decisions in my life: I bought a new laptop. The improvement was remarkable. The new laptop took just four seconds to load after opening the lid. It was was lighter too.

But in 2013, that laptop wasn't able to keep up with demanding tasks such as Photoshop or video editing. So a few weeks ago I bought another new one.

Here's a comparison of the specs between these three laptops (for specifications of your own laptop, search for "System information" from the Start menu).

	Toshiba Equium A100-027	Acer Aspire 5734Z	Toshiba Satellite C850-1LQ
Year bought	2007	2010	2013
RAM	1GB	3GB	8GB
Disk space	73GB	310GB	750GB
Processor	1.6 GHz	2.3 GHz	2.3 GHz
Weight	2.7kg	2.3kg	2.3kg
Price	?	£299	£299
Location	?	Curry's (online)	PC world (online)
State	gift	refurbished	refurbished
Screen size	15.6"	15.6"	15.6"

It took me a few days to get comfortable with this new laptop. Windows 8 is terrible. You can only display one program on the screen at a time (though this has been changed in the free upgrade, Windows 8.1). Thankfully I have software called Start 8 which makes Windows 8 behave more like Windows 7. The laptop also had a problem where it wouldn't see wi-fi networks (probably because I uninstalled some important software), so I had to reformat it. In all, I'm happy. This new laptop can load Photoshop in less than half the time as my old laptop. It has three USB inputs instead of just two on my last computer. It has HDMI output. The caps lock key lights up when it's on. The touchpad isn't as sensitive as my old laptop, which would interpret any slight contact with it as a mouse click, even during typing (I had to disable the mousepad during long periods of typing). And the best thing is it's faster. Here's a list of all the things I've done so far:

• Install windows updates (this took hours)
• Copy the files across from my old laptop
• Put the system language into french
• Make the desktop background black
• Disable all windows sounds (because they're annoying)
• Disable Window 8's edge swipes (https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/everything-you-need-to-know-about-windows-8-swipe-gestures-on-a-laptop/)

And here's a list of all the programs I've downloaded:

• Firefox (with the add-on adblock plus)
• Start 8
• Bittorent
• Winzip
• Microsoft Office
• Flash player and Quicktime
• Clipboard history and Bullzip printer
• VLC player (set it as the default media player)
• Truecrypt
• Adobe Photoshop and Dreamweaver
• Audacity
• Autohotkey
• ArtRage
• iTunes (a necessity because I have an iPod)