The Fall and Rise of Admiral Asda

AdmiralAsda

Well, this year has been fun.

I began with no credit. I got some. I defaulted. I ruined my credit score (not that I've checked). I'm beginning to fix it now.

In more detail, I amassed around £1000 of debt this year as I was earning irregularly and I defaulted horribly. Stupidly, I tried to think that if it didn't stay on my mind they wouldn't remember.

I'm now on payment plans to fix that though it feels far away.

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So, to today. My laptop is dying quite horribly right now and it's getting to the point where I need a new one. I was browsing Top Cashback and I came across Look Again. I decided to try them to see what laptops they had.

I found a nice one and I applied for a credit account to see what would happen, expecting to get declined. I didn't, and I had a second LBM - this is my chance to try and fix a bit of damage by managing my credit responsibly. I lost plenty of sleep over my original crisis but my LBM from there led me to stay calm and try and sort it. I'm going to try and manage this responsibly, and coupled with a Cashplus Credit Builder card and a SIM only contract, I should (hopefully) be able to do some small things to make myself seem less abhorrent to lenders.

I'll update this tomorrow with what I did for the day.

Until then,

{AA

Netwizard

Good luck but why do you NEED a NEW laptop? I wouldn't say you need a new laptop, more that you WANT one? Its hardly a necessity given your situation.

Second hand ones are ten a penny on ebay, netbooks are super cheap, and there is a range of cheap tablets out there now.

What is wrong with your current laptop? Is it just slow? Maybe you need to format it and start again? Laptops do slow down after a while due to all the junk thats loaded onto them in the first place.

AdmiralAsda

The laptop case is snapped, the battery is at 30% efficiency, it doesn't close properly and it overheats within half an hour of switching it on.

It is a very old laptop (7 years) and I've swapped hard drives for SSDs, changed the RAM and done all of that kind of thing. I even use a lightweight non-Windows operating system to speed it up but it's at the point where at the moment it's faster to go to the local library.

Oh, I should add that all of my banking is done online and it's not unusual for my online banking to time out before it finishes loading. This makes keeping track of money difficult as I don't have a smartphone so it's just dependant on whether or not my laptop will do anything.

Netwizard

I understand about the online thing, as I do all my shopping / banking online, but the problem with your banking taking a while to load sounds more like an internet / website problem than a problem with the internals of the laptop

Laptop Case - leave it as it is, its only cosmetic, so long as the internals still work

Battery - Take the battery out and just leave the laptop plugged into the mains power

Overheating - As you have upgraded the ram and HDD, your obviously no stranger to taking the thing to bits, so get the fans cleaned out! I did this recently on a laptop of my colleagues and the fans were just clogged with crap.

If that doesn't help, then get something like this: http://www.poundland.co.uk/signalex-usb-laptop-cooler

or a slightly better one: http://www.play.com/stores/Digiflex/listing/693346178

Certainly much cheaper than a new laptop, and then when your financially back on your feet, you can reward yourself with all that hard work clearing debts, with a nice new shiny laptop

Something like this can be had for just over £100 when you take quidco and discount codes into account: http://www.tesco.com/direct/hudl/ if you really must buy something new and again, cheaper than a laptop or what about this: http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/samsung-galaxy-tab-2-99-00-asda-instore-online-1691211