Laptop Longevity

Doh! I was out of writing commission for two days. My laptop is crap. The guy at the Apple store was like, “What do you mean by crap?”

“It sucks. It barely functions. I shut it down, power it back up, and that doesn’t even help anymore. There’s like a 30 second delay with any keystroke. Rhapsody takes about five minutes to load up. It’s so frustrating!”

I know laptops have at the most a three-year lifespan. I bought my Toshiba Portege for business school which died suddenly almost two years to the day I bought it. This Lenovo has lasted me over three years which I guess I should be happy about, but I’m certainly not.

At a Burning Man event last night, an IT guy was telling me that all computers are susceptible to degradation mainly from Internet surfing. Cooties that get passed from the WWW to your very own computer. He said the best thing for me to do would be to reimage my computer. Essentially make it brand new. That was a good solution, but I really have no idea who can do that for me. Sure I can do some research. Even he couldn’t recommend anyone. “The people who know how to reimage and do a good job won’t do your personal computer. Just like me, we do departments-worth of computers at huge corporations. We wouldn’t do like one computer. And the people you would find who advertise or are out there on the web probably don’t do a good job.”

FUCK. So where does that leave me?

At the Apple store on Chestnut Street. Love it because it’s close to my home and near Kara’s Cupcakes and The Grove for chocolate chip cookies, lots of boutique shopping, Pluto’s for yummy salads. I don’t mind waiting for 30 minutes to an hour unlike downtown where the wait is several hours. I want to sleep on it for a night, but I think I’ll be back tomorrow morning to get my MacBook. Apples don’t get viruses. But the big plus for me is that if you’re having problems you can always talk to someone at the genius bar. They always seem to have the answers.

I’ve become so accustomed to PCs, but I started out in elementary school with an Apple IIe and then bought myself an Apple computer as a freshman in college. I forget what model I had. Ahhh, the circle of life.