The title of this post kind of sums it up, like any good title should. I am starting to castigate my laptop a little too often, like every other hour when it crashes spectacularly on me.
"You useless piece of machinery! I'm going to buy an Apple I tell you, nevermind that I am a iGoondu."
The latter is of course, utterly false. I am not an iGoondu, I'm just not an iWhiz. And when I'm finally done with all the bad iJokes, I have to crack the really bad one about the iPad, which I swear is the most uninspired name for a computer device ever. If you didn't know better, you would think that Apple had entered the feminine hygiene market. Hey, you never know, they just might. After all, that is one area that will never lack demand.
I am no fan of Apple products, but I do think that the norm in CS is to be an iConsumer. If you don't own a Mac, an iPhone or an iPad, you're somehow antisocial, the archetypal outcast. Yours truly doesn't own any of those, with the only exception being an iPod that I bought secondhand off someone, and even then I jailbroke the damn thing. I guess I chose the blue pill, so I'm some kind of Neo in an Apple-crazed world. Steve Jobs is watching you, yes? He wants you to hurry up and buy the iPhone 4 so he can start releasing the iPhone 4GS.
Sorry, that was my Orwellian complex going into overdrive.
My laptop has somehow lasted three whole years without dying, but now, it is surely tottering on its last legs. And I would really hate to send it to the place where all laptops go when its their time, but the problem is, it is about its time. My warranty is up, which I totally squeezed every last drop out of, changing the casing and motherboard on the very last month. I bet ASUS hates me because I'm such a cheapo.
Now, I am starting to find that the laptop is too slow to handle all these newfangled applications that are popping up on the market. I'm not even talking about games, my laptop stopped being able to handle new games about two years ago.
But now even the simple task of opening gmail chat, facebook chat and youtube at the same time makes my browser hang. And I get random stupid bugs like my volume control refusing to open and my media player taking forever to get started, only to pop open an hour later when I'm about to shutoff the thing for the day.
It is really such a waste because I've gotten so used to all its eccentricities. When you use a piece of equipment like a laptop long enough you will know what I mean. Your laptop gets like random errors and bugs that nobody else gets, that you pray do not surface when someone else in school goes "Can I use your laptop?"
You even come up with all these weird ways of troubleshooting those problems, like my favourite one for the volume control, plugging the earphones in and out. Somehow it resets the volume control and it works fine again. The logic behind that? I have no idea, you have to ask some egghead at Microsoft.
It has reached the stage where supplication to a higher being for the darned thing to work no longer suffices, especially when the thing starts to crash so often it puts the very existence of the higher being into question. I'm not even religious, but I will do intercession because my parents taught me so. Case in point - "Pusah, today Weili has an exam, bless him with an easy paper and good grades okay? Come, take these 3 joss sticks and pray to the pusah here, okay now turn around and pray to the other one..."
"Pusah, my laptop has trouble trying to start up today. I absolutely need to finish this report, so please help it to stay stable long enough so I can finish the thing because my tutor will absolutely not believe that my laptop crashed running two instances of Microsoft Word. It was not thought possible until my laptop came along."
One more year, come on. Once I grad I will buy a new one with my first paycheck.