The Laptop is Dead, Long Live the Laptop, Mark II

So, you may recall that a few months ago I switched my laptop from Windows Vista, which seemed to be killing the hardware, to Ubuntu Linux. That halted the OS-related hardware rot, but the general hardware rot continued. The keyboard, which had always been pretty horrid, kept getting worse, to the point that yesterday I was literally pounding the " key to get it to register. The mouse track pad was suffering similar decline. The wifi card hadn't worked in months, having been burned out by the faulty graphics card. To top it off, some of the drivers I got with Ubuntu didn't quite work right. Not really the Ubuntu community's fault, seeing as they were trying to write open source drivers for closed source hardware, but still annoying.

I think you can see where this is going. I wanted a new laptop. But I really couldn't justify the expense.

Then a couple of weeks ago I discovered that Final Draft won't work under Linux. Many Windows programs can be made to run with a Windows emulator, but Final Draft's authorisation key system is non-emulator-friendly. A nice gentleman in California told me so.

And that was it. Screw the fact that I had no money, screw the fact that Final Draft is not the only screenwriting software out there, screw everything and everybody. I was getting a new laptop!

And most of all, screw Bill Gates. I got a Mac. My first ever. It's white (because I couldn't afford any of the silver ones). It's shiny. It's got a snazzy red carry case that I bought to, you know, carry it in. And it's got an operating system that isn't Windows Vista. A thousand huzzahs!

Right, I'm off to test out the graphics card by firing up World of Warcraft.