New laptop with an i7-640M processor; and a 32 inch "monitor".

After a lot of hard work, and the car scrappage schemes of last year, I got rewarded with bonus!?
Nothing like a bwankers bonus, but enough to buy some fripperies after the essentials, and I decided to replace my aging 17" desktop-replacement laptop and get me a large 28" monitor.

After much searching in the post-xmas sales, I came across a curious machine at a very good price. The Advent Sienna 710 is a PCWorld/Dixons/Currys own-branded 15" laptop that has what, at the time, is the highest speed core for a laptop processor - an Intel 17-640M for under £500.

I guess the laptop has such a low price as it will not appeal to a gamer as it relies on Intels graphics accelerator and is so basic it doesn't have the usual scroll area at the side of the pad., which isn't too hot but that makes it ideal for me as I wanted something fast and multi-core, but don't indulge in much 3D work and can live with the pad deficiencies.

Our second TV had packed up mid-2010 and we were making-do with a very old 19" LCD. Instead of getting the 28" monitor I decided to buy a 32" Sony 1080P TV and use that as my monitor.

Well, the Advent laptop and Sony TV work beautifully together. I have a huge 32" screen at a decent resolution and with the sound coming through the HDMI connection, I don't need extra laptop speakers as the Sony sound is very good  (better than on our more expensive main TV).

I ran my improved Python multi-processing example on the laptop and was very impressed with the speed, and with all the python instances appearing in the task manager.

from concurrent import futures
from math import floor, sqrt

NUMBERS = [2**n - 1 for n in range(55, 65)]

def lowest_factor(n, _start=3):
    if n % 2 == 0:
        return 2
    search_max = int(floor(sqrt(n))) + 1
    for i in range(_start, search_max, 2):
        if n % i == 0:
            return i
    return n

def prime_factors(n, lowest):
    pf = []
    while n > 1:
        pf.append(lowest)
        n //= lowest
        lowest = lowest_factor(n, max(lowest, 3))
    return pf

def prime_factors_of_number_with_lowest_prime_factor(NUMBERS):
    with futures.ProcessPoolExecutor() as executor:
        low_factor, number = max( (l, f) for l, f in zip(executor.map(lowest_factor, NUMBERS), NUMBERS) )
        all_factors = prime_factors(number, low_factor)
        return number, all_factors


def main():
    print( 'For these numbers:\n  ' + '\n  '.join(str(p) for p in NUMBERS) )
    number, all_factors = prime_factors_of_number_with_lowest_prime_factor(NUMBERS)
    print('    The one with the largest minimum prime factor is %i:' % number)
    print('      All its prime factors in order are: %s' % all_factors)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

END.