I bought a new laptop. I picked out the cheapest model in the store. I like it. It's much better than the one that was stolen. It's got twice as many cores, each about 30% faster, it's 64-bit instead of 32-bit, it's got 4x the memory, it's much quieter, it doesn't get nearly so hot, it's much lighter, and best of all, it's small enough to fit inside a locked box in my room.
On the down side, it's got a regular hard drive rather than an SSD (the one and only upgrade to the old laptop, which is probably the only reason why it was still usable), and it has noticeably less screen space (11.6" instead of 15.4"). The smaller size makes it a little nicer for travelling, but I also had to increase the font size to read easily. There's also no DVD drive, so I don't get to watch Despicable Me. I picked up that movie for $1.50, but never had a chance to watch before the old computer was stolen.
The increase in memory is actually a pretty big deal. Assumptions have changed about much memory people generally have. I can actually do stuff on this machine that I simply couldn't do on the old one.
