Saturday, November 22, 2014

My Laptop is Dead! Long Live My New Laptop!

A little over two weeks ago, I saw a message on my laptop screen that I had not seen before.  From the other side of the room, it did not look like a normal message.  With a little trepidation, I walked over to my laptop and sat down in my desk chair.  The message was indeed not normal, and it was not good.  The message indicated there was a hardware problem, and the system had stopped running.   I restarted the laptop, but the Windows operating system would not come up.  I could not do anything on the laptop.  It was effectively dead.  I took it to the Geek Squad at Best Buy to see if it could be fixed.  They could not determine what hardware part had failed.   The Geek Squad sent it to another place to get more expertise on the problem, but they were unable to determine the cause of the failure either.  They did say the mother board was probably the cause.  They also said the hard drive was still good.  I was relieved about that since I was worried about losing my data even though I had back ups.  To make a long story short, they did not have the parts to fix it, and even if they did, it would probably cost more to fix it than for me to buy a new one.  The laptop was over 6 years old, so I knew I was due for a new one.  Thus it did not take much convincing to decide to buy a new laptop.

I have had my new laptop for 8 days now, and I am very happy with it so far.  It is a Dell Inspiron 7000 series with a 15.5 inch screen, measured diagonally.  The screen is high definition with super great picture definition.  It is also a touch screen.  It runs Windows 8.1, which I am enjoying learning.  It has an Intel core i5 processor, which is quite fast enough for what I use a laptop for. It is made out of aluminum instead of plastic and looks very sharp.  I am certainly getting more bang for the buck than with my last laptop.  I paid over twice as much for the last laptop than this one, and the new one has so much better hardware and software.  That is a normal occurrence with technology.  The price goes down, and the technology is a lot better over time.  Dell's reputation has gone down over the last few years, but if my new laptop is any indication, their reputation should start heading in the opposite direction.  My old laptop had its day, but now its day is over.  Long live the new laptop.