Portfolioso.com Blog

This Laptop is Getting Out of Hand

My laptop: Now 20% more Puerto Rican

This is getting out wayyyy out of hand… I went to pick my laptop up off my desk and the battery fell out. Why? Over time, the clips that held it in place melted from the heat. So in order for it to stay in place, I have to duct tape it on.

So here’s the cumulative list of the ghetto shit wrong with my laptop:

• No sound in 32 bit operating systems without headphones (hardware failure/ no formatting or driver fixes it)
• Right side USB port doesn’t work at 2.0 speeds and is not powered (hardware problem)
• Memory card reader does not work with any driver installed
• Touchpad is physically warn out and jerks the mouse all over the place
• LCD is extremely dim and the whites look yellowed
• LCD has patches of bright light/ wear spots
• Battery lasts 30 minutes
• Ethernet cables do not click in to the port because the cheap plastic locking piece fell off
• Video card: 128MB Radeon Mobility 200m that can’t render 20FPS on normal in Unreal 2004 (which is 6 years old)
• Only 1GB of RAM which runs out daily, plus its shared with the video memory, so I get even less
• No built in mic or webcam
• Thing is absolutely huge
• The black paint over the metal on the speaker grate wore off so you see gray and it looks like crap
• 64 bit cpu is not being taken advantage of (32 bit OS and <3GB of RAM)

I’d get a new one but I really don’t like the options right now. I have been checking processor and GPU ratings all over the place and can’t find a Sony Vaio, HP or Dell that I like with the components I want in it. It seems that the ones with the good processors have half assed video cards and the ones with good video cards have crappy processors.

Fuckin A.

My Laptop’s Touchpad Can Seriously Suck It

By the end of this summer, this laptop is gone. Guaranteed. Because please explain to me how a fucking touchpad wears out? All a touchpad does is sense the capacitance of a finger. It’s not hard. So whenever I go to move my mouse, why does it spazz the fuck out and jump the cursor all over the screen rapidly? You have to see this – the cursor literally goes from one spot, disappears, reappears in another, clicks shit, goes to another spot. All so fast and without me moving my finger at all. The damn thing could be a screensaver, it’s all over the place. It’s not the driver, and it’s not a virus because it does the same shit on multiple OSes.

This laptop is a workhorse though. I don’t know how it keeps chugging along after I abused the shit out of it for 4.5 years: full CPU load for days at a time, no sound without headphones (hardware problem), I haven’t shut it off since 2006, it made it through college, so there was definitely beer spilled on it at some point, etc. I mean jeez. As much of a piece of crap this thing is, it won’t die. And as long as it semi-works, why should I buy a new one if I don’t like the half assed graphics cards that are being used. Might as well milk this to the holiday season and wait for discounts / new technology to come out.

(Half the time I have my laptop on my desk with a mouse, but when I’m on the go, it’s useless and painful to use)

Can Summer End Already?

I fucking hate summer. All I do is go to work in hot ass buildings, come home, pass out, wake up and repeat. Guess what? I can do that when it’s 40 degrees out just as well, minus sweating balls. Seriously. I don’t live near a beach, so I’m not at the beach. I don’t go to pools much. No one goes on vacation (and if I did, I’m dead serious I’d go on an Alaska cruise). I don’t do the stereotypical summer outdoor activities. I’m home in my AC, and it’s boring as hell. And it needs to end now.

No one seems to understand that if it’s cold, you can always bundle up, snuggle, put more clothes on etc. But if it’s hot and there’s no AC, there’s nothing you can do.

Also, the good part of summer is already over. For me, summer is only tolerable until July 4th. The beginning of summer is always fun because you just get out of school and you have the whole entire summer to look forward to. I like seasons, so I need a little summer, but I’ll take 1-2 weeks max before I hate it to death. But after July 4th, it drags on, nothing else is fun and all I used to do was count down days to school so I can have a[n unhealthy] life again. Although I’m done with school so…

There are so many good things coming up this fall/winter, I just want to hibernate until its 65 degrees or below outside. Then I’ll come out and enjoy these:

• September 14, 2010 (technically still summer but close enough) – New Linkin Park Album. It better not be whiny and annoying. If it’s like anything prior to 2003, (and 1-2 songs from Minutes to Midnight), it’ll be good.
• September 19, 2010 – HBO’s Boardwalk Empire series premier. Scorsese? Atlantic City mob scene in the 1920s. Sick. It’s HBO, so it’s guaranteed to be good.
• September 21, 2010 – Autumn. It better start cooling the hell off soon
• September 26, 2010 – Season 5 Premier of Dexter. That show is the shit.
• December 25, 2010 – Christmas
• December 29, 2010 – The Machine is at BB King’s in NYC. Who’s coming with?
• Q4 2010 / Q1 2011 – Android 3.0 Gingerbread. Yummy!
• 2011 sometime – New Red Hot Chili Peppers Album. Not much details are known. Might be different without Frusciante.
• Winter 2011 – I need to visit D-Porpz in that state where old people live and everyone else vacations at.
• March 2011 – Round up college friends (or whoever the hell wants to go with me) and book spring break while pretending to still be college students, not an old unemployed, fat, lazy bum. Anyway, yatta yatta yatta college girls yatta yatta. This is to make up for the fact that I didn’t get a chance to go away on spring break while I was in college (what a waste). It’s also an attempt for me to step away from reality and stop crying that my life sucks now that I graduated.

See? There’s a lot of good shit coming up, and it’s not during summer. Mec – 1. Summer – 0.