to Retire

those of you who follow me on twitter or have me as a friend on facebook might have noticed my recent computer woes. those of you who don't might have just noticed that nothing in the body of this post is capitalized. i know. there's a reason for that.

the keys running along the left column have decided to go to a better place, some lofty keyboard in the sky. so i no longer have use of the ctrl, shift, caps lock, tab, tilde, or escape keys. i can still use the ctrl and shift keys on the right, but have you ever tried? it's amazingly awkward when you also want to capitalize a letter with your right hand. it just doesn't work well. so i'm just foregoing the shift key altogether.

before there are cries of, 'why don't you send lappy for repairs?,' i'll have you know that this laptop has been serving me faithfully for almost five years. sure, i've had to replace the cd-drive, the hard-disk drive, and the ram, but those were easy fixes to do myself and, in the later two cases, were actually upgrades from the previous hardware.

anyway, suffice to say i'm now procrastinating [i'm supposed to be studying for exams. and circular brackets take too much awkward effort] by looking at laptops. currently i have my eyes on the recent dell xps 15z. it has the look of a macbook, but with windows 7 inside. of course, i'd be installing ubuntu as a dual boot, which is the part that has me worried. according to the dell and ubuntu forums, the graphics card in the 15z isn't well supported under ubuntu. apparently it works fine with 10.04, though, so i should be fine if i do choose to pick this one up.

i'm more than a little disappointed that it's my laptop that has chosen to start falling apart, 'cause i've already decided upon a replacement for my netbook when that decides to go the way of the dodo. for those interested, i'd love to have an asus eee transformer. i'm in love with it.

any other laptop suggestions? i've only really looked at dell and asus, since those are the two brands that i have used before. i know that sony usually has some good machines, and probably samsung as well. any advice would be great!

ultimately, i want a performance laptop, not a casual one. i need to be able to do photo editing, move around really large batches of files quickly, and run graphics intensive programs like google sketchup. a studio laptop won't cut it. i need me some power, 'aight?

update: the dell has all but taken the back seat to the toshiba satellite e305 and the asus u46e-bal5 (someone seriously needs to introduce them to product naming). they might not be as pretty as the dell, or quite as thin, but they both manage to pack in a tonne of features. i hate making decisions.

photo by bigpresh, acrugnola, and gillyberlin