I’ve always been into computers, but interestingly enough I never bought a good one that I actually wanted. I had a desktop which was just very slow but I lived with it as I didn’t use the computer much. I then decided to buy a cheap laptop which I promprty broke the screen of. This was not good as I had been on a roll breaking a bunch of stuff, so again I was with my desktop again.

A few months later, I decided to just buy a chromebook for its cheap price and since I wouldn’t be doing much with it anyways. I was ever so wrong, but I got to play around with linux thanks to that. That summer I actually got into a program in which they gave us a free laptop, a Lenovo Thinkpad T510. Admittedly a model that was 4-5 years old at the time but it ran fast and I was frankly amazed. I finally had a decent laptop to call my own and I used it for everything. However, I was never really happy with it: its size, its battery life, its appearance, just everything about it. So after about a year I resolved to get a new computer.

I started looking at computers around the middle of summer, looking for a good one with decent battery life, i7 processor, 16 GB of RAM and a SSD. It turns out that this wasn’t easy to do, especially with a budget of around $1,000. Then about a month or two ago, the Dell XPS 15 line was refreshed and model 9550 was released. I was in love, especially since I had loved the XPS 13 when it first came out and wanted it if I had the money. It wasn’t the right choice at the time as its max memory was capped out at 8 GB. But the 15 opened up new doors with the same design on a bigger screen and packing a discrete GPU at that. I knew it was the laptop for me, but the pricetag was so big that it made me consider long and hard.

I talked to my mom about it and she said it’d be fine for me to use the money that I had earned to buy a new laptop! Although I felt uneasy she said to me to think of it as a long run investment, and that’s exactly what I think of it as now. After all I will be going into computer related field so a good computer will be very helpful. So I decided on the XPS 15, and decided to get the i7 skylake CPU, 512 GB of PCIe SSD, 16 GB of RAM, and even a GTX 960m. Despite that, I went with the 4k touchscreen model to help with my graphics work and I have to say it is worth it even if battery life took a bit of a hit.

So I shell out big money for a top of the line laptop instead of building a very good desktop and having a lot of money left over to buy a decent laptop. However, I don’t regret it as this laptop is beautiful. It’s fast, I can game on it, the screen is amazing, and it’s basically what I had dreamed about. Its form factor also is perfect for me, as it has a very premium feel to it. Just overall, I’ve been loving the laptop and I hope to use it for a long time as I did shell out quite a bit and it’s just everything I’ve wanted. Now if only Adobe started making their apps available for Linux, I would be able to ditch Windows completely and use Ubuntu or even Elementary…