The Aesthetic Value of a Laptop

For numerous reasons my lovely wife and I are going to put our house on the market and move closer to our places of employment. Spending less time in the vehicle is an important reason, along with putting less gasoline into said vehicle. There is also the inconvenience of how far away we live from the daycare and the kid's pediatrician that we seem to visit too often. Not quite on first name basis with the doctor, but we are getting there. There is also this upcoming Kindergarten thing fast approaching and we will have trouble making that work at our current residence.

We had put the house on the market last year, but it was not long before we decided to take it off and wait. One of the things we learned was the house should not look cluttered as that tends to make rooms look smaller and less appealing to anything but severe agoraphobics, but not agoraphobics with OCD. So in getting ready we moved my wife's computer back into the bedroom freeing up some space in the living room. Now the living room is where my wife likes to reside, whereas I happily reside where ever you put my computer. Though over the years my wife has picked up my nasty habit of staring at a computer screen too much, but for some odd reason she likes to be around me. The end result is that I'm sitting where I was before, and my wife is sitting on the sofa using my old laptop.

Now, I can't be too harsh to the old laptop as it has survived quite well over the four years I've owned it. It has hit the ground from a carrying height about four times, once landing on the USB port in the back and sheering off the mouse cable that was plugged into that port. That would explain the cracks and extra openings in the case. It has taken a short bath in apple juice my son spilled on the keyboard. The delete and home key still stick and only give reluctantly. A few years back the DVD drive gave up on reading CDs, and it only reads a DVD for about 30-40 minutes. About once a year I have to disassemble it down to the CPU and replace the thermal paste when the fan begins to wail angrily at all times. Last time I forgot to run the temperature sensor over the heatsink properly and it resulted in random over heating and shut downs until I figured it out. Those are some of the bigger problems. Though, all in all, it has aged well. It is still very good for browsing the internet for the most part. Can even do some minor gaming.

I can't help but think that my wife deserves something better than my abused old laptop. She has confessed her frustration with the machine, but mostly while playing World of Warcraft when the machine goes deep into swap, which is about any time you load up World of Warcraft. My opinion is that she deserves better, so I've been laptop shopping.

Now, since she plays WoW occasionally those low voltage integrated graphics will not cut it, not that they ever do except for those bizarre Microsoft Office fan boys. So the list of affordable laptops shortens dramatically. Now we just have to find the right laptop.