A chronicle of computers past.

The summer before I left for college, I bought (well, technically Mr. Stafford of the federal government bought) my first computer. And when I say that "I" bought it, I mean that my father, in a moment that continues to frustrate and baffle me to this day (nearly eight years later), stayed up late one night and picked out a desktop for me. And purchased it.

My father is a great engineer. When it comes to keeping planes and helicopters from falling out of the sky. Computers? Notsomuch.

That computer sputtered its way through two years before reaching the point of being so unusable that I preferred to walk 1.5 miles at night to the 24-hour computer lab on campus to finish doing research. The Spring 2002 edition of Mr. Stafford went towards buying the Worst Computer Purchase Made To Date's replacement, chosen by me.

For the record, that desktop still works just fine. I made the move to a laptop in the fall of 2004, courtesy of an advance graduation gift and summer savings. For reasons I do not wish to go into (hint: don't date a computer engineer co-oping and eventually working for HP if you want an unbiased opinion), I purchased a laptop from HP.

It? SUCKS. It's the cousin-by-marriage of the original Dell desktop that I hated with every fiber of my being. First, the battery died (typical of any laptop, and I don't hold HP responsible for this). Then, I noticed that even when I had the a/c adaptor plugged in, it wasn't actually using said power. So, I've spent the past two years with a laptop that has to be held/set on a surface in *just the right way*, or the cord doesn't work.

This is all with the cord jerry-rigged within an inch of its existence (i.e., plugged in at an angle, then wrapped around the base of the laptop twice and pulled to the left).

The desktop also disappears without warning. I mean, all of the desktop icons and the toolbar just... disappear. Never to return again until the system is restarted.

This sometimes happens from the moment I turn the computer on. As you can imagine, it's beyond frustrating.

The reason I didn't replace the laptop from hell at an earlier date? I had a laptop issued via my last agency, so there was never a need to do so. Now, I have a desktop at work (a rant for another time), and I can't gimp along with the POS HP laptop any longer.

Thanks to the upcoming stimulus payment and a well-timed birthday, I purchased a new Dell laptop tonight. It's computer engineer/HP employee/ex-boyfriend approved, and it should arrive in two weeks. And, courtesy of those wonderful internet coupons, I got 25% off of the original price.

Booyah.