So some of you may remember I have been having no end of trouble with my laptop. It's a Vaio SZ4VWN and I bought it a few years ago for a (in my opinion) fairly substantial amount of money. First half of this post just rants about it so skip to the break for my dilemma. Or trilemma.
I needed something that could run good music creation software as well as graphics programmes like Photoshop, Flash etc. as smoothly as possible even when travelling, so I figured the expense was worth paying at the time. You know, an investment.
Well, it's been awful. It's a full-on Laptop War. Firstly, it came with Vista, loaded with the most disgraceful amount of bloatware. Even stripping that out and cutting out just about every pointless Vista process I could find, it still never ran smoothly. It has never once played a movie file without stuttering every several seconds, for example. Even a YouTube vid. It heats up like a furnace and blasts fans to no avail (sounds like a 360). It crashes dead at least once an hour and it's generally all-round pants.
And a few weeks out of warranty, the hard drive clapped out completely.
Knowing the hard drive was just the beginning of the problems, I paid the stupid amount Sony wanted to fix it. And what I got back was a laptop that was back to square one. And my square one was rubbish.
Now, it seems to be crashing, stalling more and more and something weird is happening with the keyboard. It's a godawful piece of crap laptop. This can't go on. On several occassions, I have been tempted to take it out the back, smash it to pieces, put it in a jiffybag and send it to Sony.
Which leads to my question - just what do I do?
If money was no object, I think I'd go for one of those new Macbook Pro laptops. It would be unfair to blame all of my problems on Vista and MS but I've never had a computer do exactly what it was supposed to anyway so I'm really tempted to go Mac and leave MS behind. The problem is simply money. They aren't cheap, especially the high-end models I'd be looking at and I'd have to buy Mac programmes from then on, the cost of which could really mount up.
And I'm not a rich man. Not even close.
A high-end Windows laptop I could probably get cheaper. I wouldn't have programme costs or issues with transfering stuff, compatibility or the like. But I'd run the risk that I'd find myself in the same boat. I mean, are there laptops out there that actually, you know... work? Does such a thing exist?
But then part of me is thinking - yeah, I run these programmes on it and all but I'd say a good 90% of the time, I'm just writing, on teh interwebs and that's it. I don't need a high-end laptop for that. What if I got a cheap laptop that was able to run videos without stuttering (is that possible?) and used that for most uses and then pull out the Vaio and suffer through it when I need to do something big in Photoshop or something? Perhaps I could find a way of replacing the crappy Vista that I hate with XP or something?
What do you think? What would you do?
I needed something that could run good music creation software as well as graphics programmes like Photoshop, Flash etc. as smoothly as possible even when travelling, so I figured the expense was worth paying at the time. You know, an investment.
Well, it's been awful. It's a full-on Laptop War. Firstly, it came with Vista, loaded with the most disgraceful amount of bloatware. Even stripping that out and cutting out just about every pointless Vista process I could find, it still never ran smoothly. It has never once played a movie file without stuttering every several seconds, for example. Even a YouTube vid. It heats up like a furnace and blasts fans to no avail (sounds like a 360). It crashes dead at least once an hour and it's generally all-round pants.
And a few weeks out of warranty, the hard drive clapped out completely.
Knowing the hard drive was just the beginning of the problems, I paid the stupid amount Sony wanted to fix it. And what I got back was a laptop that was back to square one. And my square one was rubbish.
Now, it seems to be crashing, stalling more and more and something weird is happening with the keyboard. It's a godawful piece of crap laptop. This can't go on. On several occassions, I have been tempted to take it out the back, smash it to pieces, put it in a jiffybag and send it to Sony.
Which leads to my question - just what do I do?
If money was no object, I think I'd go for one of those new Macbook Pro laptops. It would be unfair to blame all of my problems on Vista and MS but I've never had a computer do exactly what it was supposed to anyway so I'm really tempted to go Mac and leave MS behind. The problem is simply money. They aren't cheap, especially the high-end models I'd be looking at and I'd have to buy Mac programmes from then on, the cost of which could really mount up.
And I'm not a rich man. Not even close.
A high-end Windows laptop I could probably get cheaper. I wouldn't have programme costs or issues with transfering stuff, compatibility or the like. But I'd run the risk that I'd find myself in the same boat. I mean, are there laptops out there that actually, you know... work? Does such a thing exist?
But then part of me is thinking - yeah, I run these programmes on it and all but I'd say a good 90% of the time, I'm just writing, on teh interwebs and that's it. I don't need a high-end laptop for that. What if I got a cheap laptop that was able to run videos without stuttering (is that possible?) and used that for most uses and then pull out the Vaio and suffer through it when I need to do something big in Photoshop or something? Perhaps I could find a way of replacing the crappy Vista that I hate with XP or something?
What do you think? What would you do?
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