Sunday, March 22, 2009

A Girl and Her Computer

I will be posting my ramblings/reactions to the final episodes of BSG sometime this week--but in sum, I loved almost every second. I just haven't been able to formulate my thoughts into coherent enough sentences, not even for this thing.

The following is me waxing poetic about my personal computer history.

I've always been a desktop computer user. I grew up on ye olde beige CPU towers of yore, battling my brother for precious after-school computer time (mostly playing Sim City and then later logging on to AOL/CompuServ--eesh). My first very own computer was a blueberry iMac--all glossy polycarbonate clear and blue plastic, taking up over half of my desk real estate. I loved that computer fiercely for over seven years(!) thanks to my dad's computer know-how and upgrade-happy tendencies. Then I got a new iMac for a graduation/birthday present after college, and it was instant love. A huge 20" screen, DVD/CD burner, bazillions of ports, and it didn't take 20+ minutes to sync my iPod anymore! I was in love all over again. At that point I still didn't see why I would ever want to have a laptop as my main computing/entertainment device. Such small hard drives! Smaller screens! Less horsepower!

Then I got my iPod touch in Sept. 2007, and things started to change. Now, it's not like I hated laptops or anything; I just didn't see the point in making that my main means of computing. My dad was always leaving his work laptop at the kitchen table, and more than once I made use of it checking email, browsing, and whathaveyou. But my iPod gave me a sweet, sweet taste of what it's like to be able to get a hit of that internet anywhere there is an available wi-fi connection. Suddenly, checking email became exponentially more fun when done from the comfort of my own bed. Now when my mom and I had a pop culture factoid dispute, I could whip out my iPod and know in seconds who was right (usually me, heh).

But as much as I loved and continue to love my iPod, I can't help but realize that even though Apple claims you get the "whole internet in your pocket" with the iPod touch, you really don't. No flash video support means No Hulu watching in bed for me. And as nice as it is to be able to read poorly written fan fic right before I drift off to sleep, sometimes no matter how much I zoom in, it's still a bit hard to read. And scrolling down every two seconds gets to be a right pain in the ass after awhile.

This week my dad gave me a refurbished iBook G4 that he found at my mom's work just as something to noddle around with and use as a secondary computer--finally, the full, real live internet in my bedroom! And I have to say, that it is awesome. Even though the computer runs a bit slow when I'm browsing on Firefox and watching a video at the same time on VLC, I'm willing to forgive because this thing is, like, 5 years old and not in pristine condition. Still, pretty frakkin' cool. All of this to say that I've decided that my next computer purchase will be a Mac laptop of some kind (duh, would I get any other kind?)--whatever the latest permutation of the Macbook is depending on my computing needs/requirements. Now, it feels like overkill to have all that computing horsepower when the bulk of my time is spent browsing the web, listening to music, watching video, and sometime doing some photo/video editing. I will miss the gigantic screen because it is kind of like having a second TV in my living room--only this one has internet access. But I'm now willing to sacrifice a few inches of LCD real estate to be able to reduce some of the computer clutter/detritus and sit and type wherever the hell I want. It just makes sense.




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