Now and again I like to spend a little bit of money on a little bit of jank, and this time it was a Dell Latitude 3190 education laptop I picked up for £10. It’s a great example of that “throwaway society” mindset: super cheap plastics that crack easily, a low-quality keyboard that can miss letters if you type too fast, and a screen that looks awful the moment you tilt it. On the inside it’s not exactly a powerhouse either—Celeron N4120, 4GB DDR4 soldered, and a tiny 64GB eMMC that you can’t upgrade—so you’re working with some pretty hard limits from the start. I ran Windows 11 Pro on it for about a week and, while it’s a bit delayed opening apps, it does basic laptop stuff fine: browsing, YouTube, speakers are okay, and battery life with the new battery is around 5–6 hours. For gaming though, you’ve got to dig deep into the back catalogue at 768p. I tested stuff like FlatOut (playable with dips), the original Battlefront (rough), Half-Life (surprisingly not great), and Far Cry (actually enjoyable). I also tried newer “old-school” releases like Dark Forces Remastered and Doom Enhanced, which ran nicely. The big surprise was Minecraft: Java was a stuttery mess, but Bedrock was genuinely playable at low settings—though it eats 8–10GB, and storage gets tight fast. Overall, if you can get one dirt cheap with the charger, it’s a decent kid’s homework-and-Minecraft machine, but it’s also proof of how cheaply these things were built to be discarded.