Christmas Comes The Day After Thanksgiving.

I bought my laptop before going back to school. It was a factory refurbished model to save a little money. The laptop is well over 5 years old and I wouldn't be surprised it it was 6 years old. In laptop years that is ancient. A 800 MHz Celeron with 384 MB of RAM (memory) simply can't handle modern antivirus software or modern webpages. If I could run an antivirus program without bringing the laptop to a grinding halt I would try to postpone buying a new laptop. The money isn't quite there for a decent replacement.

However what was 'old reliable' in law school is now quickly dying. While Dells kept dying among my classmates my Gateway hummed along. This week I had to salvage my data to an external hard drive and reformat and reinstall Windows. This is the second time in six months I've done that. While not chattering currently, I hear the hard drive chattering excessively this week. A few times this week Windows has booted up and shut down in the span of an hour instead of a few minutes. The Gateway is on life support even with my best tricks.

The internet is a beautiful thing. I brought up the websites for Gateway, Dell, and HP. Laptop shopping is like shopping for a car: you'll never get a true apples to apples comparison. It took some time but I managed to configure a laptop from each that was roughly the same. The Gateway I liked ended up $200 more than the HP. The Dell I created was $50 more than the HP. The HP had what I viewed as a superior processor, a new Core 2 Duo from Intel. It was the slowest version of that most current chip, but it is the most current tech out there. The HP had a separate video card with 128MB RAM so it wouldn't share memory with the system. A free upgrade to a 120GB hard drive. Built-in wireless LAN, USB 2.0 ports, and 2GB RAM so Microsuck Windows Vista will run nicely. Holy crap it was a great laptop! I'm amazed at the amount of hardware you can get for well under $1,000 these days. Even with shipping and handling it's still a 3 figure deal.

The killer part is my parents decided to make it my Christmas present. I was speechless. I give my parents grief at times. They love me but don't understand how my world works. The legal world and my life is so different than their simpler world. But they love me and they want to see me happy. I wish I could say a material possession like a new laptop isn't the key to my happiness, but right now it is. Thanks Mom and Dad.