After six years and five months, I finally had to get a new laptop. This made me very sad as I loved my laptop and it was still near the top of the line on speed. Not so much on hard drive capacity, but I hadn't filled it yet. But it had other issues.
I kind of had a problem, though. I'm hard on laptops. I kill them at alarming rates--or at least I did until I discovered the Sony Vaio. That baby could take everything I could throw at it. Sadly, Sony sold off their PC division to some other company, and at the time I checked, they only had a couple of models available in the US and none of them even remotely interested me.
After researching, I finally made my decision. I went for a 17 inch screen since I don't move the laptop too far or that often. Two hard drives. Yea! A solid state drive that isn't huge, but can hold all my programs and a 2 TB regular hard drive for all my files. It also is souped up.
I know a lot of people buy the cheapest PC they can find, but now that computer specs aren't going obsolete as fast as they did fifteen years ago, I've developed a new strategy. Buy the most laptop that I can afford. That's why my previous laptop was still near the top of the line after more than six years. It's more cost effective than having to buy a new one every couple of years and I would with a cheaper one. Writers are very hard on computers because of all the typing we do. It's also time consuming (at least for me) to setup a laptop with all the files and programs I need, so only doing it once every six plus years is a huge win.
So I've had the new laptop for nearly a month now. I'm still slowing adding programs I use, but the files are all transferred. I have a cloud backup and I downloaded from there. I also used up 90% of my Comcast cap for the month so I couldn't stream movies or baseball for the last 10 days or so of May. Sucks since I almost never use even 15% of that damn data cap. But that's a rant for another day. :-)
Anyway, I do like the new laptop, but I loved my last one more. The nice thing is, though, that this one is quieter because the fan isn't blowing at maximum for the entire time it's running. I also like the extra screen real estate. My Sony was 16 inches and I didn't think one extra inch would make that much difference, but it did.
I'll have to use the laptop a while longer before I render it a fit substitute for my beloved Vaio, but so far, so good.
