Roll the Dice — Mama Needs a New Computer
Posted on 26 November 2007
Gee, you dangle technology in front of me and I get all gushy. The Thinking Blog is hosting a contest between now and Dec. 20. In exchange for posting about it, you get an entry in a drawing for (you can all sigh with me) a brand-new RuffBook Tech. It’s billed as a rugged, water-resistant laptop with a magnesium alloy casing. The descriptions are certainly impressive on the website — including the photos of a water-soaked laptop with mud piled on the keyboard.
Now that’s the kind of laptop that might survive even me. I’m hard on my computers — and laptops in particular. My old orange iBook endured through two keyboard replacements, spilled diet Cokes, the occasional drop (OK, more than occasional), and my constant use, with its screen getting darker and darker and the hard drive eventually grinding to a halt.
My current HP Pavilion ZD8000 has a frayed power cord that keeps popping loose from its connection to the computer (the plug-in end is kind of warped). Battery life is about 45 minutes if I’m lucky. The case is battle-scarred from being toted around so much, and the silver is worn off the corners of the plastic case. It’s been knocked off the couch by the cats and off the bed by me, and my kids have lugged it around in my carrying case as delicately as if they were handling, uh, bricks. The touch pad wore through to a green base in the first three months I had it, and eventually it widened and deepened to an oval clear spot showing the touchpad mechanisms beneath (kind of cool, actually). The heaviest-used keys have the letters worn off them. (Yeah, I’m at the keyboard a LOT.) No dead pixels on the screen yet, but it’s going on three years old and it’s just a matter of time now.
And it looks like my laptop will have to last me, no matter what: My youngest daughter wants a computer of her own and at 10 she’s getting old enough and insistent enough that I’m having to share mine more than I like. (What a bad, bad geeky mom I am.) My oldest is going off to college next year and is in need of an upgrade from her old desktop system to a MacBook Pro for her graphic design studies. And I’m thinking that mine will just have to endure for another year or two since their needs are more acute than mine. Darn it!
Suffice to say that a rugged laptop was designed for ham-handed users like me — and the timing is perfect! So I hope to win. Until then, I’ll keep my fingers crossed … and the diet Cokes away from my keyboard. (*slurp, fizz*) Well, mostly.
4 responses to Roll the Dice — Mama Needs a New Computer
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I’m just reading through all the entries in The Thinking Blog’s challenge. I must say, yours is the best written so far. My laptop is really worn-out too, but it seems like you deserve The RuffBook Tech even more than me so if I’m not the lucky winner, I hope you are!
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