Tech problems don’t usually sneak up on me. That’s one of the perks of keeping up an, uh, “aggressive” pace on upgrades. For the last three or four months I was completely perplexed by the cause of my laptop slowing to a crawl. I ran diagnostics on diagnostics and kept coming up with the general result that the system was clean. Unfortunately, I overlooked the most basic issue of all. It seems I have been asking my 2008 model laptop to run at 2012 efficiency with a scant 2GB of onboard RAM. Woops. That’s really something I should have caught as soon as things started bogging down on me. Total amateur mistake. Then again, it’s been a good long time since I’d kept a computer for four years that it wasn’t an issue I usually ran into.

The problem is solved and all is again right with the world. I can run Chrome, Word, and iTunes all at the same time without everything grinding to an agonizingly painful halt. There’s a sexy new piece of kit sitting on my desk serving up content to every other device jacked into my home network. It’s a happy thing. It was a purchase I wanted to make anyway, but the sorry state of affairs with my underpowered laptop gave me enough of a nudge to let me justify all out replacement (at least in my own slightly warped mind).

I haven’t quite decided what to do with the laptop yet. Picking up a RAM upgrade would probably run about $50 and would easily buy it another 2-3 years of life as a backup or secondary machine to use when I don’t need to be tethered to the desk. Then again, that’s mostly the role the iPad fills now. I guess the question I’m going to have to ask myself is if I even have a need for a laptop anymore or with almost everything headed for the cloud is it a form factor that has outlived its usefulness?