So four years ago approximately half-way through my sophomore year of high school my grandpa, Pepe, decided that he would buy laptops for myself and my younger brother. I was ecstatic. At that point I had my sister's old Dell laptop that she had abused so much that the monitor was half broken off, it ran terrible, and the adapter out had recently stopped working. I had been really upset when I had first gotten it because the deal had been that Connor and I would would get the new laptops my parents had ordered, and our sisters would keep their old ones. However, once the new ones came in they changed their minds and said they would give the new ones to my sisters and Connor and I would get the hand-me-downs. Unfair.
Anyways, so about four years ago when I finally got a new laptop I treated it like it was made of gold. If anyone even put their finger close to the screen I would freak out because I didn't want to smudge it up. My new Acer ran all the games I couldn't play on the Dell and they looked amazing. However, now that it's almost four years old the story is quite different. While the condition is nowhere near as bad as the Dell laptop was, the Acer had reached its prime awhile ago and it has been declining ever since. I've taken the best care of it that I know how, but it has gotten to the point where I can't even play Snake of Facebook without having it slow down my computer and make it lag. I know it's not a virus or anything like that because I run by anti-virus stuff all the time and had a computer guy go through all the stuff just to make sure. It's just old and all the components are dying down.
Now it was actually last year around this time that it became like I mentioned above and became a hassle to use as I frequently had to restart the laptop in order for it to run semi-smoothly. I knew it was time for a new one, but I decided to wait after I finished my freshman year of college before I started looking. It was an incredibly frustrating year as it got to the point where restarting it four or five times a day was normal, and I basically had to stop all my beloved gaming because my Acer just couldn't handle it anymore.
I was relieved when summer came around because it meant I could finally get a new laptop. I had checked around before and I knew I wanted an Alienware m17x laptop. I knew it was expensive (on the site to get a new one costs 1.5k without adding on any special features), but this was the first time I had ever been able to choose one for myself and I would be able to get just what I wanted and not be disappointed. My mother was okay with me getting a new laptop, but she said she wanted me to wait until after we secured a loan for school. I had made it through one year with just grants, scholarships, and my own money, but now I needed a loan. I thought, "No problem." and agreed. Unfortunately, the financial aid office isn't the best and we only just confirmed my loan status this past week after waiting all summer.
I was eager right away to get my laptop. By this time though I had realize that I would be able to find a used m17x on eBay that would be almost perfect and a lot cheaper. So I went onto eBay and searched for what I wanted. The very first option was exactly what I wanted. It was almost brand new and had been used by a computer repair guy so he had taken great care of it. The price was almost half of what buying a new one would be. It also only had two hours left for bidding. I know I probably should have looked around on other sites or explore my options a little bit more, but I made my choice right then that I wanted to get that laptop.
So my watch began.
I checked eBay every couple minutes to watch the timer slowly tick down. It went to an hour, then half an hour, fifteen minutes, ten, and so on. I have rarely been so nervous. I knew that the last two minutes or so of an item bid on eBay is the most intense, and in order to keep the price as low as you can you want to wait until the last possible moment to place your bid. So at one minute left I entered my first bid and struggle began. Instantly I was already outbid, and then I place two more higher bids with the second one making me the highest bidder. Someone outbid me again, and I used eBay's automatic highest bid button to put me back at top. I got it, and with two seconds left on the clock someone outbid me again. I barely could even look at the price when I clicked the auto-bid button again. There was a couple seconds as I waited to the see the outcome, and for those seconds I was sure I had lost.
Then I got the green letters telling me I had won the laptop.
After all those months of frustration and waiting, I had finally gotten it. I went back and checked the bidding history. For the last bid someone had put the same amount the auto-bid had set for me, but thanks to that button I had been a split second faster, and thus, I won. It still seems very surreal. I'm sure most of you know what it's like to want something so badly, and when you finally get it you hardly can believe it. Of course the laptop isn't here with me yet, but hopefully within the next week (and best of all even with all that bidding the price was still a couple hundred below what a new one would cost). For now I'm just contenting myself with the pictures the seller put on eBay:
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