Welcome home, Lappie!

Saturday, 28th November 2009 - what a day to remember. I brought home my new friend on that beautiful day, and when I switched it on, it literally blew me away, I was so impressed. You might have guessed by now - the picture above is surely a great hint - that I'm talking about my new lappie. My old one has been giving me some trouble for quite a while now, and I don't see why not, after all it's nearly 5 years old (ancient by laptop standards), and although it's been a faithful friend, I thought it was time to put it to rest. Coincidentally, the PIKOM PC Fair was going on, so it was very convenient, no waiting around eagerly, albeit impatiently, for the postman to come with his precious cargo.

Everything's so fast, so brilliant, so shiny and new! I haven't even removed the plastic cling wrap that protects some of its surfaces! And best of all, I don't need to download various programs to open up my videos and stuff, in fact I can play my multimedia files using just one program! Shock and awe! And all this while I thought I was being so clever... All my technologically-superior friends must have been snickering and smirking behind my back. Oh the shame! And I got so used to going through long and winding procedures just to connect to the Internet, that I spent almost an entire day trying to figure out the same with my new lappie. I was so embarrassed when I finally realized I just needed to press one little button. Oh the shame, times two! And with my old lappie, it could take anywhere from 5 to 15 or even 20 minutes for Internet Explorer to be running smoothly, and some of the more 'advanced' games (the ones requiring fast action clicking) were practically unplayable, or would jam up the entire system; with my new lappie, it takes only 90 seconds for it to boot up from start to functionality, an additional 30 seconds (even less at times!) to get the Internet up and running smoothly, plays all sorts of games (hurrah!), has about 3 hours battery life when I use it like I normally would, and takes up only approximately 2 hours for the battery to charge up from dead to full (yeah I actually timed it all with a stopwatch, I was that enthusiastic and excited!). It's even got a webcam (so I can Skype now if I want to) and some strange hi-tech thingy called a FastAccess Facial Recognition program.

It's so mind-boggling at times I just sit back and stare at my new friend. I'm scared to press the wrong button in case it all disappears in a poof of smoke! I'm scared of clogging up the hard disk space and memory logs and rendering the lappie slow and obsolete again, so I'm saving most of my programs on my Maxtor external hard disk. Silly I know, seeing how my new lappie claims to have 320 GB of free space (I checked - it's really only about 283 GB). And the biggest - and most humiliating - lesson I've learnt from this whole adventure is that I'm really not that tech-savvy after all. Cheers!