I Miss My Laptop

Now that I am forced to use my desktop on a daily basis, something I had gotten out of the habit of doing for the past four months after I brought the laptop home, it is driving me crazy.  It is like having dial-up Internet service, it is soooo slow to load anything and at least 50% of the time, the response is an error message.  At the moment, I am trying not to scream, as I have tried twice to open Picasa and both times it opens but then I am told it is "not responding".  Do I want to send an error message to Microsoft? Of course not, does anyone actually read those things??!! I highly doubt it.

I am assuming my desktop's memory is overburdened, I've got several thousand photos stored on this machine and it probably needs more power or for me to spend some time deleting stuff off of the hard drive.  Some day, I might deal with these issues but in the meantime, I really need to get to the computer store and buy my replacement laptop.  The good news is, the insurance company tells me the cheque is in the mail.  I can't decide if I should buy the exact same machine that was damaged in the crash, which was an HP Pavilion and which I really enjoyed in the short time we had together before it was damaged in the crash, or whether I should take my friend Kate's advice and get a Mac (for a substantially higher investment, I might add).  They say once you go Mac, you won't want to go back. It's not that I don't believe them, I just don't know if I can afford the time or money right now to learn a new system.  It's a bit of a dilemma.

I have a day or two to decide...