I bought a new laptop last night.  It put me back $1250, extended warranty included.  Yeah, I was doing so well, and then I let them talk me into the warranty.  Somebody remind me to go get a new battery in a year.

My other laptop still worked, if you took the faceplate off and hit the circuitry with the back end of a screwdriver.  Repeatedly.   The hinged on the display were broken, so you needed to prop that up.  Spyware launched incessantly, whether you clicked on anything or not. Occasionally some virus would launch new IE windows continuously in swooping pattern across the screen.   But even still, this laptop had fewer problems then my old 486. 

That computer had character.     You couldn’t put the keyboard directly on your lap because it would shock the daylights out of you.  The display would switch to 1’s and 0’s for no reason.  The mouse only worked on the left side of the screen. Every time you started up, the computer would fax your resume to some guy in Idaho.

 Yeah, but she could hum. We’re talking a 486 with 8mb of ram, in 1991!  Comanche would have knocked your socks off, but we were enamored with TIM and SC2.

The latter being the greatest computer game ever.