A few of us at work got to renew our laptops and we've all gone for the latest Dell M3800.

Sporting a 3200x1800 (touch) display, 16GB RAM, and a 256GB SSD this is a beast of a machine to work with. Scott's post about High-DPI displays couldn't have come at a better time, there's plenty of well written apps (Visual Studio 2013) and not some great ones.

Being 15" inches it's larger than what I would prefer but it tips the scale just a bit over 2kg - so it's going to be much more practical lugging it home each night.

Since Microsoft removed the windows experience index from 8.1 there's no scoring of this unit, but the screen is really bright and startup times are one of the best I've seen.

I recently re-subscribed to the New York Times after offering a 12-week access for only USD$0.99, can’t beat that – I’ll decide later if I’ll keep my subscription at the end of the program. However for those NY Times readers who live outside of the US and running Windows 8/8.1 you might have a hard time getting the app to launch.

Installation is quick and straightforward from the app store but upon launching the app you’ll be greeted with the following splash screen along with the rotating progress bar (which doesn’t get captured using the print screen button).

nytimes-loading

So I fired up Fiddler 2 to see what’s going on behind the scenes and found this little nugget. Notice that the url contains the region and language code that’s set for my PC.

nytimes-404

I then grabbed the URL and modified the region-language to be en-us and sure enough I got a valid JSON response in return.

Now to get this working without some URL hack one needs to simply change the home location via region settings to be US. Of course you may not want to do this as it may affect other sites but as a quick measure to grab your news this little hack seems to get around the problem.

region-nytimes-location-us

Whilst waiting on the mrs for I popped in to the local JB Hi Fi stored to have a look at the new Lenovo Miix 2 8" Windows tablet (say that ten times fast!). After reading great reviews about this device I really thought this might fill the lack of a similarly speced Surface tablet.

Unfortunately, what most reviews fail to state is that there's only 9GB of user storage space left (on a 32 GB device), and this is without Office 2013 installed! I had a look to see if there was any bloat ware that could be removed and there isn't much space that can be saved on this device - so they're running pretty lean already.

So if you are in the market for a Windows tablet before you swipe that credit card have a quick peek at what storage space is actually available. You may be surprised.