I need a new laptop.  No, really.  This isn’t one of those guy things where I say I need a new laptop and that means that I want a new laptop.  My hard drive is failing.  I get those semi-random blue screens when I boot that say something about bad sectors and running CHKDSK, which I do, and it fixes it, for now.

I know what you are thinking.  I could replace the hard drive.  I checked into it, but it will cost me a $100 or so to get a reasonable one that I trust enough with my data, and since I’m talking about buying a $400 or $500 laptop on a smokin hot deal, a new hard disk is 25% of the replacement cost.  That just flat out does not make sense.

Now, here is the part that keeps bugging me.  I went through Best Buy and a couple of other places and pretend typed on the keyboards of pretty much every laptop brand there is.  I like the keyboards on the HP laptops, the real HP laptops, not the Compaq laptops, which I know are made by HP, but which have much different keyboards.

Now, there is no shame in buying an HP laptop except that I can get a laptop with similar specs for cheaper by buying another brand.  Theoretically, my choice could be justified by things like build quality, or “intangibles” or other things, but frankly, I haven’t looked at new hardware in so long, I have no idea what the deal is with those things anymore.

So, I feel like a sucker for buying an HP laptop.  I never, ever, ever, pay for brand names.  I think that people who wear designer clothes are morons (I don’t care if was hand stitched by Marcus Ameriachus in Italy, there is never a reason to pay $800 for a shirt!).  Whether HP makes superior laptops or not seems to be a matter of opinion, so in the back of my mind I feel like I’m paying for the name.

In the end, I will buy the HP laptop because I am a writer which means that I spend way more time than the average bear pushing my fingers down on those keys and I want it to be nice, or more specifically, I refuse to let it be irritating in even the slightest way.

And so, I wait, for the killer sale that sends an HP laptop with my desired specs into my price range.  Common’ recession!