halp! are you a mac guy(gal)?

Recently I learned that Williams offers a loan up to $2,000 to purchase a laptop for currently enrolled students, which doesn't need to be paid back until nine months after graduation, and the payments for which will be suspended if the student continues onto grad school.

Here's the 411 on my current laptop:

1. No battery power. NONE. As in, when the adapter falls out of the power plug, my computer stops EVERYTHING it is doing, looks at me like this:

and then rolls around on the floor violently, making gagging and gasping sounds, kicks its legs up in the air a couple times, shudders a violent death rattle, and dies. Without even thinking that MAYBE, before it left this earth, it might be polite to back up some of my work.

Rude.

2. The screen. It has somehow become loose, it weebles and wobbles (but it won't fall down!), and basically it lolls about like a newborn baby without the muscles in its neck to support its head.

3. The N key is completely gone. It's just a lone black key. Good thing I played word typing games LIKE IT WAS MY JOB in 6th grade, so my fingers have memorized where it should be.

4. The DVD player is going, which means that my ability to play the Sims and watch Sex and the City in lieu of writing papers or studying for finals is becoming severely threatened. This would impact my life in catastrophic, inexplicable ways.

5. It's four years old, which is about 80 in computer-years.

6. Norton and MacAffe (however you spell it...I honestly have a panic attack every time it pops up and click violently to get rid of it so I can't be expected to have memorized the spelling) straight up COMPETE with one another to do scans on my computer NOT once a month, NOT once a week, but literally every.god.damn.day, which completely overtakes the system and makes everything else unbearably slow. The whole "we'll just do this in the background so you can keep working while we clean up!" is completely false. And also, they NEVER find anything! So why the persistence?

Clearly, a new computer with this loan program, which has a 5% fixed interest rate, is a wise investment. BUT, in a world overrun by Macs, what is a PC girl to do?

(PS, I know that a lot of people become enraged by the use of "PC" as the contrast to Mac, because Macs are also "Personal Computers," but for the love of god you know what I mean.)

So here are my questions. Do you use a Mac or a PC? If a PC, which kind, and has it treated you nicely or have you been cursing the day you ever got it? I'm thinking of getting the Dell XPS15. Heard good things? Bad things? Lukewarm things?

Do tell!

PS. While we're on the subject of computers, I have a funny story for you. The other day I was in the library, attempting to actually be productive and work on a paper. I had my headphones but my iPod was dead, so I plugged my earbuds into the library desktop computer--surrounded by about 50 others, most of which were taken. It was a quiet, peaceful Friday afternoon. (I know, how lame am I for being in the library on a Friday afternoon?) I'm currently on a movie soundtracks, especially Hans Zimmer, kick, so I pulled up a song from Inception on YouTube and went to town.

But the music sounded really far away. I kept turning the volume up louder and louder but it only got marginally louder in my headphones. I was completely puzzled. Then I looked down.

OOPS, JK THE EARBUDS WEREN'T PLUGGED INTO THE COMPUTER.

It gets funnier.

The song was this one:



And I started turning it up right around 1:35, aka the most badass completely embarrassing part. The entire library got to be privy to a very, very loud Hans Zimmer horn on a lazy Friday afternoon whilst they were trying to write papers and study.

The end.