manualoverride

When I knew my income was going to be destroyed I prepared by stopping all my outgoing subscriptions immediately. Changed phone plan to bare minimum etc. traded our car in for electric which cut our fuel bill from £100pm to £15. Finally I’m slowly selling my stuff, but I’m now at the stage where I have a 10 yr old laptop, 8yr old phone and something is going to break soon. Fun times.

Farrage is already peddling the project 2025 playbook and the morons that vote for him are lapping it up.

And only a 3 seater sofa

Extended family “IT Guy” here. Have replaced 30ish laptops batteries. The cheap ones on Amazon/eBay you have a ~30% chance of them being DOA, and 99% chance of them being dead within a year.

“Brands” like Duracell GreenCell I’ve had better luck with but I’ve been sent batteries from GreenCell which only lasted a year because they were sitting on a shelf for 3 years before they were sent to me.

OEM batteries tend to last longer than the originals as most BIOSs from Dell, Lenovo etc. now include battery optimisation which extends the life of cells.

It all come down to what you need, and how much you value your time compared to money. My personal stuff I always go OEM as I rarely replace my laptops. Current one from 2015 is still going strong. If you are willing to put up with returns and rapid replacements a £20 cheapie can look good when the OEM is £100

EDIT: Sorry just re-read your question. The OEM at 75% health is dead already. The cheap no-name ones are probably just random used cells thrown together.

You’d probably be better off with the no-name but for this use case just get the cheapest thing with a 1year warranty and cross your fingers.

I’m not sure this did change, at least I can’t find any reference to it, other than a potential proposal.

I’m in the UK, short-term cheaper alternative is keeping your existing gas boiler until it breaks down… so roughly 20-30 years. The government gives £7,500 towards a heat pump but that has resulted in prices staying artificially high and virtually every install for a 3-4 bed home comes in at £10,000. A new gas boiler is around £1,500-£2,000. Due to some other short sightedness, any heat pump which also cools is not eligible for the £7,500 grant, which is really problematic when temperatures keep rising.

Bought our first electric car this year and will never go back to Diesel. If heat pumps weren’t so expensive I’d have one installed tomorrow.

I went back through your posts to find out where you were based… and I have discovered that there are in fact many stupid questions 😀…

This may be different in the US as your distances are a little larger… but we charge at home overnight and have never needed to charge anywhere else. Every morning we have 250miles available and 1200miles a month costs us ~$30 in electricity.

You may be able to get a prepaid debit card and use that on public charging stations for long journeys or emergencies.

User replacement of “Activation Locked” new, 2nd hand, and OEM parts can be done, should be done, won’t be done.

How is he still selling so many cars? We all saw the Nazi salute, the backing of the AFD, Reform UK etc. A 50% drop in sales is actually quite disheartening.

Competition does not work for an industry where each product is infinite so can’t ‘run out’, but is subject to exclusivity agreements.

That was really informative - so much so you should watch it… but if you really can’t; there are 6 types of data broker and these services only target 1 and in that one they only manage to remove ~1.5% of that data in 6 months of membership.