23 June 2010

Help! Upgrade needed

I own a computer. A laptop, if I were to be more accurate. And, if I were to liken my computer to an animal, mine would be a dinosaur. Like most dinosaurs we know of today, my computer lives in that netherworld between life and death – a fossil. OK, mostly dead but occasionally popping up in some desert in the middle of nowhere just as a reminder that it was once the bee’s knees.


Yes, my computer (if you can call it that these days) is nearing the end of its life. It’s pretty much on life support at the moment. I’ve got a fan/cooler thingy plugged into it but as soon as I plug it out, it gets all asthmatic and refuses to work.

The memory modules on it have been upgraded to as much as it can take while I think I upgraded the hard drive to its now oh-so glorious 40GB capacity!

It’s not like I demand high-end usage out of it. I don’t use it for gaming nor do is use it for any fancy graphics work. It’s strictly for browsing the www and even at that, it fails horribly. Some days I could get away with a good hour or so out of it. Other days, it won’t even start up. Firefox works sometimes. Safari, even less so. I’ve not bothered installing any other browsers for fear that the thing might just implode, leaving me computer-less. And that would be a horrifying thought.

So, having endured the pain for so long, I’ve decided to end my misery and get myself an all-new computer. But which one do I go for?

Since I’ve started blogging recently, the ability to blog would be my base requirement. I know it sounds like a pretty basic requirement but if you’ve been working on the piece of fecal matter that I’ve had to work with all this while, you’d understand.

Next up would be the ability to mess around with images with relative ease. Relative ease being the key words here so, that should bring the specs up by a few notches. As a continuation of that, handling video without strange beeps and whirrs coming from the computer’s innards would be nice as well. I’d finally get to properly edit all that video footage that’s been lying around the house, collecting dust. All untouched and rarely seen again ever since they were first taken. A few of them almost a decade old at this stage.

There’s also the question whether I join the hordes of Steve Jobs converts and switch to one of the Macs. At first, my initial impression was that Macs were just for iPonces but after the good experience I’ve had with iTunes, an Airport Express and an iPod Mini, I’ve slowly warmed-up to the Macs although I still wasn’t fully sold at that stage.

That quickly changed as soon as I started messing around with a friend’s iPhone recently. After a couple of minutes on it, I was hooked. Absolutely hooked. Intuitive is a common buzz word when one is trying to sell tech-type stuff like this but, in the iPhone’s case, I personally think that all the hype is justified.

Having experienced the iPhone, I’d definitely consider having one of the iMacs on my shortlist of things to buy. When will I finally get myself that? I don’t know. With this bleeding recession going on, that shortlist is a bit of a misnomer at this stage.


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