Sony, bless their cotton socks,

Sony, bless their cotton socks, finally responded to six months of emailing them about my laptop problems - and very, very kindly agreed to swap my GR114SK for a totally specced-up GRX516SP - something which makes me very happy indeed. But I just discovered what a nightmare it is trying to find a decent bag for a laptop with a 16" screen. My old bag is a Tom Bihn courier bag with a laptop insert, great because it has loads of space for my clothes and other travelling gumph, but not so great because the insert isn’t big enough for this new monster, and also because I’m starting to get a crippled back from constantly carring it over one shoulder (the new laptop also weighs one kilo more… argh!) So I decided I needed a backpack - and I went to PC World, because I need one by tomorrow, and they have a huge range of bags there - but the backpacks are atrocious. None of them seem to indicate what sized machine they’re designed for, and although my Vaio fits inside all of them, it always protrudes out of the top of the protective inner, meaning that the top corners of my laptop are protected by approximately 1mm thickness of nylon fabric. Not good.

In the end I decided to buy a Techair “Libera Grafite” backpack, with aforementioned lack of protection, and an additional Caselogic neoprene computer sleeve which is also only supposed to accomodate 15″ screens but actually stretches to envelop all 16″, and the whole bundle still just about fits inside the protective sleeve in the Techair (although it’s a bugger pulling it out again). Not ideal, and £20 more expensive than just buying one bag, but it’s quite nice having the techair as an extra separate if I want to travel light (although the Tom Bihn offered that facility too). Also, it’s worth it for the Japanese-style slogan on the cardboard box which the Case Logic came in: