Who needs a dorm with a functioning stovetop when your computer is hot enough to fry an egg?

Every new semester is a chance to start fresh. New classes, new routine, and sometimes new housing—but one thing that never changes is that I’m never sure how much longer my very-old and very-overheated laptop will last.

I told myself I was going to replace it at the end of sophomore fall, but before I knew it, it was sophomore spring. Then it was junior year. Now, it’s senior fall. And somehow, this laptop is still chugging along. 

But as the end of my time at Barnard nears, I’m more concerned than ever that my laptop may not be up to the task of senior year. For some context, here is everything wrong with my laptop ranked lowest-to-highest by severity:

• Only one of its two charging ports is functional. More of a bother than a major issue.
• It’s slow and freezes constantly.
• Whereas other laptops sleep when you close the lid, mine often decides to fully reboot. I hear this is a relatively common problem, but it is annoying to arrive at class just in time, only to require an additional five minutes for my laptop to restart.
• The cooling fan turns on at full speed as soon as I open the lid. It doesn’t wait for the laptop to get too hot—it already knows what’s coming. This is okay when I’m in my dorm or at the library, but I dare not have more than two windows open at a time while in class unless I want to be embarrassed by just how loud the fan can get. If I’m lucky and the AC in the classroom is running, the sound will be drowned out. 
• The drag-and-drop function on the mousepad does not work. I don’t know exactly what happened here—maybe I accidentally got water on the mousepad one-too-many times, maybe I dropped my backpack and something broke—all I know is, I’m lucky it also has a touchscreen.
• It gets very hot. I know every laptop gets hot, but the levels of hotness mine reaches from loading up a video alone are truly concerning. I am well past the point of Googling “can a laptop melt from overheating?” and “how to tell if my laptop fan is broken” and have accepted that, if I want to watch a movie on this device, I simply cannot have it in my lap unless I want it to fuse to my jeans. At a certain point in the 20-open-tabs essay-writing process, I can feel the heat radiating from the keyboard just by hovering my hand over it! In fact, I can feel it at this very moment and I only have five tabs open! Concerning! 

I’m sure to some people, these issues are nothing. Even I’ve seen laptops in worse condition in my time at this school—and besides, making tech products last instead of buying new is better for the environment! I’m determined to close out my undergraduate years with the same shitty laptop I began them with.

Still, as the prospect of 50+ perpetually-open tabs looms, I return to the same question I ask myself every four months: Will my laptop survive the semester? Will the mousepad stop working entirely one day? Will I attempt to open one-too-many windows during midterms, causing the cooling fan to call it quits once and for all? Will I finally bite the bullet and just take it to a repair shop instead of continuing to treat these issues as a minor inconvenience? Only time will tell!

Header via Pixnio and Canva