My New Best Friend

Today I finally realized that forcing a two-year old netbook that cost $187 when I bought it and whose hard drive (or a netbook version thereof) has 12 GBs of memory to allow me to make PowerPoints, run electronic dictionaries, read .pdf files, use some equivalent of Microsoft Office to write articles and plan class activities, and spend a lot of time on-line all at the same time is simply not going to happen any more. I mostly made it work for 2 years but as the time passed my needs grew and the netbook's desire to tolerate me diminished. After spending all day today staring at the dreaded "Your memory is running dangerously low" message, I had to acknowledge that 12GBs only go so far. An academic without a fully functional computer is as much of a joke nowadays as a computer-less blogger.

So I decided to reserve my old and trusty netbook for the purpose for which it was originally bought (blogging while I travel) and just buy a new computer. So I did. Meet my new best friend by Toshiba. The hard drive has 500 GBs, which will finally allow me to do everything I want and run any number of programs simultaneously and not think of which program I need to sacrifice and uninstall on this particular day. The battery is nothing special, but since I'm not planning to move this laptop out of the house, it's unimportant. The screen is big. Compared to my tiny netbook, it's humongous. Only now I have begun to realize what a strain it was on my eyes to do everything on the smallest netbook in the world. Of course, there is a downside to everything. A convenient big screen comes together with a really huge keyboard. I have very small fingers, so the keyboard is daunting. Well, at least I finally have a real computer of my own.

I'm happy, people. Now I will really be able to blog a lot. As opposed to that really paltry amount of blogging I used to do before I got this new computer.