#Literally I have tried everything from restarting my phone to clearing my tabs

[chameleon8]

AAAAA MY TUMBLR KEEPS BREAKINGGGGG

LIKE WHY IS IT IN PLAIN TEXT??

[donnerpartyofone]

About 5 years ago, I bought my first laptop in many years, because I got sick of relying on my work computer, which was provided by a job that I was dying to quit anyway. I wanted to move away from Apple for various reasons, I liked the increased customization I heard PCs have, and really, all I needed was a glorified typewriter that I could also use to check email and look at stupid Tumblr. No gaming, no photo editing, no storing or streaming music or videos; I just needed a text application and an internet browser. At the megacorp where I worked, all the high powered tech douches had Lenovos, so I went out and bought the cheapest Lenovo I could find, a Yoga 2, the type of thing I imagined stingy parents sending their kids to college with. This thing has been the actual bane of my existence from the moment it entered my home. For a little while I actually lost it in my tiny apartment because I had learned to give it a wide berth, the way you instinctively avoid people who constantly whine and pick fights just for the stimulation. My entire experience with it is:

- The fan has never worked, ever. It has never made one single sound. For a few years if I so much as tried to preview a jpeg, the laptop would overheat so dangerously that I couldn’t touch it. Then one day this just stopped. The fan still doesn’t work, but it doesn’t burn so infernally anymore. I don’t know why.

- Every time I use the laptop, several times a session, the mouse just disappears. Sometimes clicking still works (if my invisible mouse is on something), sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it comes back, sometimes I have to restart the machine using the touch screen functionality.

- Often, the computer does not wake back up, even if it’s only been sleeping for a few minutes. The power button is lit up, but the screen remains black. Usually I have to force shutdown and restart it if I really need it for something. One time when I did this, I suddenly got an empty red screen with the word LOCKED in the middle of it, and nothing else.

- Any time I edit a text document, even when I save it and shut down appropriately, the next time I try to open it, I’m told that the file is “locked” and I have to do this clunky back end thing to access it.

- Sometimes when I am using any program or combination of programs, the computer suddenly starts acting like I have some other mystery thing open and active on top of all of them--everything is grayed out and I can’t access anything that I can see, that I was just using. Trying to force quit everything I might have open does not resolve the issue.

- The file manager is to be avoided entirely. Just now I downloaded a PDF whose filename started with the world “Filipino”, and it took my computer at least four minutes to see if I had anything remotely like that on my entire hard drive, with this stagnating load bar and everything; at some point I tuned out and found something else to do. Now I see that it couldn’t find it. I have about 4 text documents and 10-15 jpegs on this machine, just sitting on the desktop, and that’s the entirety of the content I have created or downloaded, ever.

- Basic things like Chrome, which I would think of as at least PC-friendly, have problems that I have never experienced before on any type of device. Sometimes I’m putting together a Tumblr post like this one, and when I click “Post”, the button is active, but nothing happens. However, if I click “Cancel” or try to close the tab, it warns me that I am going to lose my work. Often when I switch between tabs, the older tabs are either completely blank and need to be manually reloaded, or will not reload at all and just have to be closed, and then I have to go search for whatever I was just looking at in a fresh tab. Sometimes I’ll go to an old tab and find that it looks like it has loaded normally, but if I use the address bar to Google something, it just cycles forever, and usually causes the whole browser to freeze.

- The actual process of starting up the computer is like a Terrence Malick movie. At first it’s hypnotic and suspenseful, then it goes on so long without change that I have to find some other way to occupy my mind while I’m waiting for it to finish whatever it’s doing. Once the desktop finally shows up, I immediately get a spinning wheel if I try to click on anything, or just move the mouse around. This goes on for such a long time that I usually get up and do the dishes or make some food or read a book or just start fucking around on my phone, so that eventually I don’t remember what I was trying to do with the computer in the first place. When I remember later, if it was really important, I just use my husband’s computer because I don’t want to start this waiting process over again by waking up mine. In this way, the computer trained me subconsciously to just leave it alone, avoid it, and try to forget it’s there, like a watched pot that literally never boils. This is how I managed to waste the entire period during which I could have tried to get it repaired under warranty, or just get my money back.

- ...and finally, I once had to contact Lenovo’s customer service because my computer was stuck on the start menu, and there was nothing I could do to access my desktop, files, or applications. After more than an hour of conversation, I finally gave up when it became unambiguously clear to me that the agent did not know what a desktop was. We even initiated screen sharing, and they still didn’t know what the problem was from looking directly at it and clicking around. When I found myself describing what a desktop was in baby talk, the way you might try to explain it to a space alien or cave person, I just ended the conversation. Eventually the problem resolved itself, somehow, for some reason. 

So anyway, I gotta get a new laptop. I’d still like to stay away from Apple, although maybe it’s not as important as I thought it was before I had all these problems. I have a little more money than I used to, but I still don’t have any reason to splash out on something really serious--I still have the same very basic needs. Anybody got a line on anything that isn’t hilariously shitty?