I've had a beautiful looking white HP laptop that I purchased in 2009 and it lasted a long time (seven years for a laptop is about 100 years in technology years). I got it when I still worked in radio and I scheduled hundreds of hours of music on it back in the day, built my social media presence on it, edited photos and video, and a long list of other activities. It was an expensive investment for me at the time (around $500) but I felt I needed it to better do work for my career. In the last few years it's been on my desk in my office and I used it to monitor Twitter throughout the day among other tasks.
I bought a second one a couple of years ago and use that one primarily at home and the other one I transported back and forth to work.
The white HP finally was showing it's age last week. The fan in it started running at full blast in my air conditioned office at work and did that all day even though I elevated the machine to give it the best ventilation. My co-worker Alex explained that it was likely the thermal paste in it was failing. That is apparently a substance that is on the CPU to disperse heat and works in conjunction with the fan to keep the computer cool.
I could either dump a bunch of money into getting more thermal paste put into the machine or retire it and move on to new technology. I chose the latter.
The new laptop I purchased is freakin' sweet. It's got a 256GB solid state drive, so it doesn't use a fan to cool it. There are no moving parts inside. The solid state drive (basically a giant flash drive) also works faster than a traditional hard drive. The new laptop also has 12GB of RAM and has no problem with multitasking and is super speedy. The new laptop also does a few other interesting things I've never seen before including facial recognition to log me onto the computer and I just have to move my hands over the keyboard for the backlight on the keyboard to turn on automatically.
I'm happy with the purchase. I never like spending a significant amount of money on something but I've been so impressed with the new machine that I feel like it was worth the investment. I'm typing this blog entry on it!
In other news, Anthony hasn't been feeling well all weekend so I went to the grocery store alone today. It's not as fun, but that's sometimes how it goes.
The weekend's over, back to work tomorrow with a shiny new laptop!
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| At Walmart Neighborhood Market.... someone put this candy with other candy. Nooooooooooooooooooooooo. |
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| I brought Anthony home a surprise from the store: The Reese's Crème Puffs. He was really excited, I hope he likes them. |