Saturday, February 14, 2015

New laptop, maybe I'll write more now.

Last year at some point, my house was robbed. There were no signs of forced entry, so I'm assuming that a particular roommate left the door unlocked as she was wont to do. They took my bike and two others, a glass of change (the glass had been dear to me as I got it from a pub in Dublin on a trip with some community leaders from both sides of the Irish conflict), and my laptop, a refurbished Dell that I had struggled to have delivered after buying it on ebay. Since I had bought the laptop as a replacement for my old one that died, there wasn't too much saved on it that was lost; most of my files are saved on an external hard drive. (I have yet to become a cloudhopper; I'm still creeped out by the fact that someone could get to my half-finished novels and whatever else because that stuff is stored on servers located elsewhere.)

We have an outdated old laptop of Chris's brothers that we can't update because no one knows the administrative password and because it runs on XP, which is no longer updated by Microsoft, so I needed a replacement. Given my struggles with ebay, I wanted a brand new one. Soon after I got a new job and was issued a Macbook Pro, which I don't like and which has confirmed my suspicions that Apple fans are tools who have been fooled into thinking they're using a superior product by the emphasis on style and the fact that initially they didn't get viruses (because not enough people were using them to make it worthwhile for people to develop viruses for them.) If I needed something from the web that I couldn't do on my phone, I could use the Mac. I wanted my own but couldn't decide what to buy.

Last month I read a review on Gizmodo about the Dell XPS 13 and I finally knew what I wanted, so I bought it right away. I just received it yesterday and already know it is the right choice. I needed a laptop for our trip to Spain in April and this is the ideal machine for travel, as it is smaller, but not so small that I can't type on it, as so many of the new ones are. The 13 inch screen is a good size, too - you wouldn't feel squinty trying to watch a movie on it. What's more, it features the kind of mousepad that Mac has - one of the redeeming qualities of the Mac - on which you can scroll with two fingers and the right and left click are not separate buttons. I bet I'm one of the first non-techy people to own one. It's going to sell well.

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