OneAndOneIs2

At the end of 2007, for a variety of interesting reasons, I found myself celebrating Christmas in Arizona.

It was cold.

The pound was unusually strong against the dollar, I had a bit more spare cash than usual, and I was having problems with using my clapped-out second-hand laptop for my teaching stuff. The fact it ran Ubuntu not Windows being one of them.

So when I was in a Best Buy for reasons I no longer remember, and saw an Acer laptop for a mere $400 which would have cost more than 400 pounds back in England, I said "To hell with it" and bought it. It was cheaper new than my old laptop had been second-hand, and it only had to live a few years. It had Vista installed on it, but that was fine, I was going to dual-boot it anyway.

The problem with buying a computer that you won't need for long is that it's like trying to fix a computer bug that should only take five minutes. Somehow, it never quite works out as planned.

So here I am in 2011 and I'm still using the same laptop. Which, in fairness, has lasted longer than the Acer laptop my dad bought. But it's.. well, it's dying.

The battery was the first casualty, and here I'll hold up my hands and accept the blame: Using a UK laptop charger for three months in the USA was never going to be a really good idea. So a battery life of a few minutes I don't really blame on the hardware.

Then, a month or two ago, the optical drive simple ceased to function. This was annoying, but not actually a big problem: I hardly ever use CDs or DVDs, I have a USB hard drive.

But then came the killer: The WiFi went dodgy. It constantly dropped the connection. Usually only for just a few seconds, nothing major that caused any trouble with my browsing.

But for the last three weeks, I've been stuck working form home.

That means multiple SSH connections to the development server, with Gnu Screen running remotely.

And the constant loss of network is suddenly a *huge* problem. A browser can act like a buffer: I can spend an hour typing this blog post without a net connection, then just hop online and post it in the space of a few seconds. No problem.

Typing into a terminal, it's *all* about the network - if you're not online, you're not typing.

And terminals don't deal well with disconnects - they tend to die if they notice them. So it's 50/50 whether what you typed before noticing the lag makes it eventually to the server, or the server just fades away with all your work.

Worst of all, though, is the weird way that the constant connection drops seemed to affect Gnu Screen - individual screens started to lock up and could only be dealt with by a Ctrl-A Shift-K, which *really* screws you over if you were using a text editor in it.

So.. basically.. the laptop is dying. And it's been driving me *nuts* for the last two weeks when I've been finding it hard enough to use a computer at the best of times.

Maybe I'm spoiled by my previous computer, the desktop currently residing in my parent's garage. I built that one myself, from components. Every piece of it had been researched to be sure it was reliable and well-supported by the OSes I wanted to use on it. It was the most bullet-proof machine I ever had.

One of my complaints about my laptop on Twitter drew a response from @dellhomeuk, as it happens, offering to help me decide on what new laptop to get.

I have nothing against Dell, but I wouldn't even buy a desktop PC from them, let alone a laptop. Because although you can spec the machine you get from Dell, you can't actually control what goes into it: Sure, you can say what CPU and how much RAM. But you can't say "I want THIS motherboard, and memory made by THEM, and THIS make of hard drive"

And laptops are even worse - no matter WHERE you buy them, you can never guarantee what's in them. And that tends to mean that the cheapest version gets stuck inside, because hey, who's going to know?

Well.. I am, for one. The reason I built a PC from components in the first place was that the RAM in my old one was faulty and causing Signal 11 errors. That's why I got top-of-the-line Crucial RAM - Sure, it was only 512MB and I might have been able to afford 1GB of generic RAM. But I knew that it wouldn't give me any problems.

I might consider getting a tablet in a while - they're under more pressure to use reliable parts since they can't easily be replaced - and I'd love to build a new desktop. Or even have somewhere to put my old one.

But a new laptop? Not if I can possibly avoid it.

Not unless somebody finally comes up with a laptop you can easily build yourself, anyway.. if I don't know what hardware's inside it, I don't want it. I'm sick of cheap hardware proving that you get what you pay for.