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Sorry i didn't write yesterday, I was at a good friend of mine's birthday party from right after school until pretty late. I didn't write until late tonight because I simply forgot due to the amount of work that I had to do today, including AP prep.

Anyways, so my laptop completely died on me on Monday. The laptop was about 6 years old, with two people using it in its life time. It was originally my sister's laptop when she was in high school, but she stopped using when she got a Mac for her birthday during her first year of college (last year). About half way into the year last year, I accidentally spilled soda on my laptop while on a Skype call. It remains to be one of my greatest regrets. Still having to work, I was given my sisters old laptop until I could get a new one for college. The laptop was slow and dirty, but I made due with it. I eventually made it more my own, I had a pretty all right set up with it, still extremely slow, but I could bare it. This year, because I am in 2 computer classes, and the school computers are extremely slow, I have been using my laptop. The laptop was slow, but faster still than the school computers, but I digress. I had already been in the habit of bringing my computer everyday, I just used it a lot more at school. On Monday, during Webmaster, which is the last class of the day, my computer wouldn't start. It would turn on, show the company's logo, say "Starting Windows" with no logo (it was a Windows 7 machine), then show "Windows is Loading Files" which is what happens when you run a repair disk. The screen would get stuck at "Windows is Loading Files" screen. After trying to boot in Safe Mode, the laptop would only try to load one file (the whole screen is supposed to be full of all the files it is loading), and go back to the "Windows is Loading Files" screen. After trying Startup Repair (even getting to that was an ordeal), and getting a whole array of weird errors and occurrences, I declared the laptop garbage. The Windows files on the hard drive simply could not be read by the machine. Luckily, the next day, I was able to boot Ubuntu off of a USB to get my personal files onto my external drive (at least the ones that didn't also die). 

The day my computer died, I talked to my dad, and he, being the greatest dad on the face of the Earth, said that funds of the price range I wanted a laptop from existed, and that he will look into ordering me a new one. That very night, he ordered me an amazing new gaming laptop. It is an ASUS ROG gaming laptop. It has 16GB of memory, an NVIDIA GTX 970 3GB graphics card, and an eight-core Intel Core i7, well worth the >$1000 price tag. Best Buy originally said it was going to come in on the 20th (#blaaaaaaaze), but it actually came in a week earlier, on Wednesday. I have been on it basically nonstop since I got, and I love it. It games well, the screen is beautiful, and developing on it is a total joy. Here are some pictures of my beauty.

It also has a really nice back lit keyboard that includes a STEAM button, and an XSplit button. Overall, even though parting from the old laptop was somewhat sad, this new laptop is definitely an appreciated upgrade that is definitely worth it. Well, I have to go sit down with my Daft Punk, coffee, and English homework, because I am 2 weeks behind on a major project and would like to catch up so I can go back to focusing on the AP tests coming up in a couple of weeks.

-José Rodriguez-Rivas