In Love with My Laptop

I think most college students would be willing to agree that the day their laptop crashes, their world will come crashing down as well. My life is on my laptop: my photos, my music, my to-do lists on desktop Post-its, all my important papers and documents from college, and a folder of funny emails, IM conversations, etc. that I’m just not ready to let go of. Plus, how do I charge my iPod? On my laptop. How do I get pictures off my camera? With my laptop. How do I do the majority of my communicating with the outside world? Via my laptop. It’s a fact — my laptop is key to my sanity.

Laptop

Well, believe it or not, my precious laptop died while I was abroad. Died, as in would not turn on. It was completely useless to me. How I survived isn’t important, but those 2 laptop-less months were some of the most annoying of my life (thankfully, the fact that I was spending those months in the Mediterranean made up for it). Now, my laptop is back in action. And although I wouldn’t have traded my semester in Greece for the world, there were certainly moments when I was laptop-less and couldn’t help but think “How different this predicament would be right now if I was back at William & Mary.”

As a freshman, I purchased my IBM Thinkpad through William & Mary’s myNotebook program, and it was a great decision. For a real deal, I got my ultra skinny and lightweight laptop plus an incredible, and very comprehensive, 4-year warranty. If I ever do anything to screw up my computer — and I mean anything: drop it, lose a key to a vaccuum cleaner, spill a smoothie all over the keyboard, accidentally destroy my hard drive with an internet virus (2 of us those are real life stories courtesy of my roommate), or do anything else to harm its normal working condition — I just take it to William & Mary’s on-campus Internet Technology (IT) Department, and they’ll fix it right away. Guaranteed. For free. The warranty even covers off-campus and international locations (meaning I could have had it fixed while abroad if there had been a location near me in Athens…there wasn’t, and I had better things to do).

So if you’ll be enrolling at the College in the near future, I absolutely recommend getting a laptop throught the myNotebook program. New this year, they’re also offering a Mac option, which is really awesome. Click here for information on myNotebook.

With wireless access literally everywhere on our campus, you’ll quickly get used to using your laptop nonstop. Check Facebook during lunch. IM from the middle of the Sunken Gardens. Find out the score of the big game while you should really be studying in the library. And with technology this great on right on campus, it’s no wonder I’m in love with (and maybe slightly too-attached-to?) my laptop. 🙂