Roger That

The desktop experience on both is garbage, they are both 100% app focussed (in line with the local market, I guess). The search is not great on either. They push things they want to sell, rather than what you want. I assume this is by design. Generally I prefer Lazada because it accepts foreign cards and I've found the overall experience to be slightly better. Shopee is often slightly cheaper for a given product, though. I tried to request a refund on Shopee recently for an item I paid for via QR code and the seller subsequently changed the description, making it a different product to the one I ordered. The process to try and obtain a refund was horrendous and not worth the time. I ended up settling for a voucher rather than jump through their ridiculous ID verification hurdles. Won't be making that mistake again. Hopefully a refund would be more straightforward if I paid on card but I don't know for sure. I seem to recall getting a refund from Lazada in the past and it wasn't as bad.

That's an article from a commercial VPN provider extolling the virtues of using a VPN. Hardly surprising.

I was typing out a long reply about why you need a new PC but I'll just cut to the chase and say... You need a new PC. Don't waste time and money on trying to upgrade that one.

Is that for an external? Agreed, seems like a good price for a new one. Hard drives in general seem to be priced similarly to western Europe here, IMO. Higher end models / large capacities are more expensive than Europe though, that goes for IT equipment in general here in my experience. Of course they're cheaper in USA, almost all branded consumer electronics are.

Any (legit) one will work. Don't get the suspiciously cheap offerings on Lazada, Shopee, they're all fake.

I don't think the value ratio is good on 500GB external drives any more (if they even still make them?). Best to look at 1 or 2TB portable drives from Toshiba, Seagate or WD. Looks like you can pick up a 1TB Toshiba Canvio from Advice for 1380THB which seems reasonable enough. Or 2TB for not much more...

Bill Gates's greatest accomplishment.

Typo or other mistake here and should be 25 January 2005?

Go on...?

Best of luck to you. I assume you are aware of Blackpool's reputation? Not one of the finest towns the UK has to offer these days...

I doubt you'll be able to. I wouldn't overthink it, any drive is likely to be fine for general use.

I believe that the Crucial MX500 is regarded as one of the best SATA SSDs on the market so would probably be a solid purchase. Unless you have a particular use case, performance differences are largely on paper and unlikely to be noticeable in real life, so just buy based on brand preference / price.

I'm tapping out at this point...

Harsh truth: This PC is now pretty much e-waste. You've had a few years out of it (I guess?) which for the price you paid is probably pretty good. Time to replace. You can go used if money is tight. You can probably pick up a used 24" monitor for ~2000 THB (maybe less!) and an ex-business Lenovo, Dell, HP etc. PC in a compact case from Shopee, Lazada etc. for perhaps 6000THB. That'll be significantly better than what you have now. Make sure it has at least 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD. That should keep you going for a few years with the potential to upgrade after that. Use an external hard drive (a branded one, Toshiba, Seagate, WD etc., not the trash one from Lazada above) or a USB flash drive to copy any important files from the old PC to the new one. It would make far more sense to do this now rather than waste any more time or money on this device. My 2c!

Bringing one back from Europe a year and a half ago definitely turned out to be a good decision!????

Edited: sorry, misread! ????

Just wanted to add another recommendation for Brother here. Good experiences with them.

This will be a tricky problem to solve on a forum as potentially a lot of background and information is needed. If you "lost Gmail due to leaving Google" where are you planning on receiving emails now - is this something the new host are supposed to be providing? If so, really they should give you the instructions on how to achieve this.

A tablet is what you want.

I get the same on sportsdirect.com (also AIS fibre). Probably geo-blocking, lots of websites block access from Thailand. Fitradio works for me though.

Yeah, Brother are the best at the low-end IMO.

I've got a feeling that AIS (and maybe others) hijack DNS queries (although I've never properly tested this). Presumably encrypted DNS (in particular DNS over https) would get round this although my knowledge on that is a bit sketchy. If anyone knows any better feel free to chime in!

It's an all round bad idea. Windows 11 isn't that different. I suspect after a few weeks you will get used to it.