When I had just finished college, and I realized that I no longer had the ability to use internet with a connection that didn't involve dial-up, I decided the time had come for me to finally break down and buy a laptop. I had a bit of money, so I went to a store and picked out a mid-range HP laptop with a sizable hard drive, 4GB RAM, and a CD/DVD burner. To make matters even better, it had a spot for you to plug an SD card RIGHT INTO THE COMPUTER. This was living it up, and I was a very happy girl. I took the laptop home and promptly wrote a very crappy novel on it during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).
That was nearly seven years ago.
My new laptop was running Windows Vista, though, so there were some problems. Windows Update was a nightmare, there were warnings every 30 seconds asking me If I Really Wanted to Open Internet Explorer, Was I Sure, and Just In Case, Did I Want to Change My Mind Before It Was Too Late? I found a fantastic tutorial, learned Windows Vista inside and out, turned off all those ruddy warnings, and made Vista run more like XP, which was a very functional form of Windows that I am quite fond of.
Years passed. My laptop was lovely.
Around Year 3, the cooling system of my laptop wasn't working all too well...and the battery wasn't holding a charge because the fan had to run so very hard to keep the whole computer from overheating and shutting off.
After a bit, someone on Twitter clued me in, and I saved myself a good chunk of money by not buying a cooling dealie for the laptop. Instead, I used a cooling rack from the kitchen. It worked brilliantly.
I was still using it ages later, when the inevitable happened. After five years, the laptop finally came into contact with the ground.
I didn't drop it. But I had sat down on the bed, where the laptop was sitting (on the cooling rack), and the shift in weight caused the cooling rack to tilt, and the laptop dropped off the bed and onto the floor.
That was when the DVD drive stopped working.
Also, there was an incident with buttermilk that made my speakers a bit less than ideal.
And the hard drive was full, so I'd bought an external hard drive for my photos and documents. And then I bought another for my iTunes library.
And even still, in the last two years, there developed a bit of a lag with the keyboard. I'd type a sentence, and then another sentence, and then the rest of the paragraph, and when I'd moved on to the next paragraph, the first few words would finally appear on the screen, quickly followed by the rest of the paragraph. It was only about a 30 second delay. Not that big of a deal, really.
But finally, a few weeks ago, it got much worse.
See, I had to keep the laptop plugged in, because the battery would die if I didn't, as the fan had to run as hard as possible just to keep the whole thing running. And for some reason, the plug wasn't working so well...
I mean, the cord worked. The cord was fine. It was the part of the laptop, the port in the side where the plug went in. For whatever reason, plugging in the cord, it didn't make a difference. The little blue ring around the port, it didn't light up so well anymore. I would have to turn the cord around inside the port to make the blue ring light up.
A week passed, and it wasn't just something I could solve with a little wiggle of the cable. Nope.
By last week, I had to spend 15 to 20 minutes messing with the cable to get it to connect and stay connected. And I knew the time had come.
So yesterday, I bought a new laptop. It works. I'm utterly shocked. I have no idea what to do with a working laptop. It's another HP. I read all sorts of reviews online, and this one was well liked by all. It has a massive hard drive, 6GB RAM (that can be expanded to 8GB), and it is quite an improvement. It hasn't died once, words appear as I type them, and even though I haven't tried it yet, there's a DVD drive over on the side here that seems willing to accept a DVD and maybe even play it.
I don't even know how to deal with this.
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