Computers are stupid

My current laptop is an HP run-of-the-mill Windows dealie, and I got it in November 2010 when the motherboard and other mysterious bits fried on my previous computer, which was just over five years old at the time.

Lately, I've been seeing signs that my "new" laptop, which is coincidentally just over five years old, is suffering the occasional head cold and has difficulty getting out of bed in the morning.

I realize that a five year old computer is considered rather geriatric these days, but this is still SO FRUSTRATING.  A piece of equipment that costs multiple hundreds of dollars should not wear out, become obsolete, or otherwise become useless after only five years.

Aaaargh!

One of the most annoying things recently has been trying to use the internet.  Web pages were taking between two and five minutes to load, which is a short space of time in real life, but is eons and eons when there are Things To Find Out About Stuff.  And don't even try to watch Netflix or Amazon Prime video.  Not happening.

I've used Firefox for years and it never let me down until recently.  So I tried Internet Explorer (yuck, even worse) and finally settled on Google Chrome as the best of all the horribly slow browser choices.  Hilariously, I did discover that if I uncheck the box in the Google Chrome settings called "use hardware acceleration when available," the browser runs better.  In other words, turning off the acceleration makes it run faster.  Huh.  Whatever.

Yet still, the internet is slow, programs randomly freeze, and sometimes shut down altogether.  I don't even try to read email on my computer anymore, it's just so much easier on my phone.  My laptop has also decided that it no longer recognizes my phone and iTunes won't talk to it at all.

I have virus-checked, malware-checked, cleared caches, eaten all the cookies, offloaded unneeded files to an external hard drive, and done All The Things.

And yet still a web page takes an excessive amount of time to load and I can't watch movies on my laptop without them catching and seizing a few times a minute, and the video lagging behind the audio.

I'm afraid that I will need to buy my quinquennial computer soon.  I have been seriously considering a Mac because I'm so fed up with PCs.  Macs seem more reliable and the people I know who have them really like them.  And I really like my iPhone, iPad, and iPod.  Apparently, I'm an Apple aficionado in iDenial, since I've always said I like PCs better.

I'm just having a really, really hard time wrapping my head around spending that much money (OMG, Apple products are so expensive) on a laptop that doesn't even have a CD/DVD drive built in.

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So many first-world problems in this post.  Sorry.

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