Dear Acer laptop,
We first met when I was looking for the cheapest laptop at Future Shop to bring to the University of Toronto with me as I picked up my last couple credits during my first maternity leave. That was six years ago. You wore a shiny, faux metal cover as was the fad and were dubbed some sort of media player because of your extra wide screen.
Almost immediately your battery started sucking and I didn’t even get through that year without having to look for the nearest outlet at the library to write up my papers on metaphysics. The whopping 15GB of space on your C drive and the 30GB on your D drive weren’t very much six years ago and now they are laughably small. To make matters worse, you must have become infected with some sort of worm or virus or something about three or four years ago because your memory kept disappearing even though I never downloaded anything ever. I wound up having to delete such superfluous programs as Microsoft Office and the effing audio driver just to free up enough space to keep the computer running. I may have lost my temper at that point, dear laptop. I may have called you some pretty horrible names and threatened unspeakable violence.
And then suddenly it stopped. Maybe I finally deleted whichever program the virus was hiding in, I don’t know, but you stopped losing memory. For the past couple years I’ve kept on using you, waiting for you to finally sputter out for good. I can’t listen to any audio, so I miss out on most of the viral videos that are going around and I don’t follow any vloggers or anything like that. Your battery is basically completely dead, giving me less than five minutes away from a plug and I’ve been afraid to update any of your software lest it become to much for your fragile memory board. But day after day, you have kept starting up, letting me surf the net and use Google Docs for work and WordPress and Flickr for my blog. I started to think maybe you weren’t on your way out, after all.
I started to become kind of proud of my old work horse. Everybody else would be bragging on their new Mac Notebooks or whatever, but for $1000+ less I was able to gain access to the same internet as them, check my emails and work on my blog for six years running. (Note that very few of those people actually need a Mac for video editing or some other advanced computer skill. Their needs are like mine: surfing the net, email and word processing.) The kids knocked you off the table a couple months ago and your cord hasn’t been the same since. I’d have to search for the exact right angle to hold it at and then make sure not to move you around or you’d turn off. I’d look over at where Irene had peeled off your stickers and where she spilled nail polish on your keyboard and at the old space bar she ripped off. I’d jam my finger down hard on the sticky “9” key and think about how amazing it is that you still worked.
Then, yesterday, you wouldn’t connect to the internet. My iPod and my Blackberry and Ed’s laptop connected just fine. I disconnected and reconnected a dozen times. I tried a bunch of other things techy people suggested on blogs and in forums. And nothing. You said you were connected, but no pages would load. I’m afraid this is the end of the line for us.
The timing kind of sucks since I have no money to replace you, right now. I’ll have to use Ed’s laptop when he’s at work and the baby’s napping. But he usually needs his own computer in the evenings, when I do the bulk of my work. So we’ll have to figure something out soon. I think I’ll get another cheap PC and see if she can go half as long as you did.
And don’t confuse my sitting around on the couch streaming video for love, dear laptop. You’ll always be number one in my heart.