I hate my computer

My biggest enemy in life is my laptop; I've been using a laptop for almost 7 years now. And I have always found that my laptop has found the best time to hurt me. I have had my laptop stop working for no reason. I have had my wireless card continuously reset and therefore stop any downloads I was in the midst of (including one that I had done 96% of). I have had my laptop screen pop right off the rest of the laptop. I have had my motherboard stop working. I have had my screen stop working. I have had my caps lock key pop out and refuse to go back in. I have had my space bar stop working. I have had a few drops (ok, maybe not a few) of juice fall on laptop and destroy my keyboard when I had a 6,000 word essay due in two days. I have had my computer reset in the middle of writing an essay. I have had a battery that stopped working within two weeks of getting a new laptop. I have had my laptop refuse to acknowledge my printer though I had already installed it. I have had a blue screen pop up that mentions 'dumping physical memory'. My laptop is also shedding its lovely black color and now I can actually see the metal under it!

All in all I have had a crazy experience with laptops. To tell the truth I think I came out of it pretty easy. My roommate in the US had her hard drive crash about 3 times (she lost all her information twice until she got a CD burner and backed her information there). Serves her right for buying Dell (sorry to any Dell lovers, she actually started a group called I hate Dell after it) The thing is that I use my laptop for pretty much everything (it has a disk space of 20 GB (I think) and I usually have 3 GB free at most): pictures, music, assignments, video games, downloads, etc... Until recently I haven't been able to back up most of the stuff on my computer as I didn't know how. Now I have to sit for hours attempting to transfer it all to my mom's desktop so that we can burn it onto a DVD.

I just read Ben's post "a vitalised iPod anyone?" and I realise that with all these new technologies we do become very dependent on them. They have mass storage, and yet, once you do something stupid, or sometimes they stop working, and its all gone. And yet most people don't learn from these mistakes and go right back and do the same thing. Is it because we trust these new technologies? Or is it that we just don't know how to go about backing up files?

I have always found that at a time when I have the most work, my laptop will stop responding. Yet I myself continue to depend on it and rely on it when I have an essay. Of course its not just me, people depend on it for classes, as well as in offices, as well as over the place. It just makes me wonder what would happen if something like Y2k (which I never really understood) hit and hit bad?

And then again, I remember someone posting on how cell phones today are easily breakable and stop working after a while, and get so out of date. At the same time, the laptop does this too. I bought my current laptop four years ago, and now it feels so outdated as other laptops have upto 70 or 80 GB and people never have to worry about space. As they don't worry, I struggle with keeping as much space free as possible. New models are always being tossed up, and of course, they are constantly improving. Now fewer games work on my laptop which is just horrible (of course good when you need to study and shouldn't be procrastinating) as they all need better graphics cards and things like that. And its not like the laptop is so cheap to buy, especially for students.

So basically my main point was of people's dependencies on their computers as well as other new media, and why no one does anything to back their files up (including me). But I must say as much as I hate my laptop, I am constantly using it. After all they say 'keep your friends close and your enemies closer' (or maybe I'm just saying that in hope that she won't stop working in the next week as I have three essays to do!).