Saturday, February 15, 2014

New Laptop

Well, it finally happened. It seems to happen to me a lot unfortunately but my old laptop finally fell to the point where i got tired of using it. My old laptop which had seen me through the last two years of my schooling died, and that is a concerning number for someone like me because the average laptop life-span should be right around the ballpark of twice that. Way back in 2010, i graduated High School, was preparing to go to college and i felt the need for a laptop so that i could take all my notes and do all my homework on that instead of wasting paper and wasting time with my incredibly slow and sloppy hand writing. As a solution, i had purchased a netbook when they were brand new on the line. my whole thought was that maybe the compactness of a 10.1" screen coupled with the extraordinarily low price point of 250-350 for the laptop would make it a worth word processor that is easy to transport back and forth to and from school to keep all my notes on. Well that netbook didn't last very long as one especially crappy night i had set it on the roof of my car and forgot it there until i made a u-turn and threw it off the car, onto the street where it exploded. I had a friend of mine retrieve all of the information they could from the reasonably destroyed hard drive, to which i put on my new netbook that i had retrieved that night and started over again. That netbook lasted much longer as i was able to hold onto it for roughly a year and a half before it was stolen from my bedroom during a vacation trip with the family to Big Bear, California. That theft was exceptionally agitating for me because i was actually planning on bringing my laptop with me on the trip to do some writing when my mother and step-father insisted i leave it at home, only for us to get video footage the day before we were supposed to go home of my step-father's ex-wife breaking into our house and stealing it out of my room. So from the insurance claims on that one i decided that perhaps it's time to go a little bit bigger. We went to best buy and there just so happened to be a brand new ASUS laptop which had a 13" screen and one of the first or second generation i3's in it. It was originally marked at roughly 1000 dollars but since it was a display model that was no longer on display, i got it for the smashing deal of about 600 dollars after tax. that laptop has been the one that i have done all of my blogging on up until now. Living in Arizona, we tend to get very hot summers. We're talking 104 in the shade. and with me being a college student and also running around frequently to do computer service work, my laptop never really left my car very much. Well it can get up to 300 degrees inside the cars in Arizona in the heat of summer. So problems started to arise with the laptop. The LCD screen started to warp, the hinges started to break, the seams of the laptop split causing the second issue to get worse, touch pad got less and less responsive. But i kept it repaired with healthy supplements of super glue and willpower. Finally, the other day the seam of the body split up by one of the hinges, and the screen started flickering in and out so it was time to get a new laptop. I decided that i didn't really care too much about the price tag so long as it filled a couple requirements: 1) The laptop needed to have a solid aluminum body, like the MacBooks 2) It needed to run Windows natively for school because i don't have time to try and make a macbook dual-boot. I managed to find my laptop. It's from a company i wouldn't normally purchase, but the price is so competative for a solid aluminum bodied ultrabook that i really just could not pass it up. So far i'm loving it. The whole thing is built really sturdy without being incredibly bulky or pricey and the performance off the specs are surprising for what i need it to do. All in all i have to say i'm rather pleased with the machine and am praying to god that this is the last machine i need to purchase for a very long time. We're talking 8 years minimum.

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