My Asus laptop died with a rattle, cough and a shudder after five years and nine months of service. It's funny how I don't know how much time I myself have left, but I can't go 24 hours without a computer!

I knew it was dying. The signs were there. The screen started having a hard time coming on at start up even though something was turning on. It would take several tries with hard shutdowns and I'd always be relieved when the Asus logo appeared. Then the keyboard started getting sluggish, another sign of a waning computer.

For its last few weeks I didn't turn it off at all to keep the screen on all the time, but finally it seized up and when it did, I knew that was it. I guess I knew from recent experience, people do that, too. When it's time to go, it's time to go.

A fried motherboard is the computer equivalent of a stroke or heart attack. It froze up, the fan started whirring at high speed and after about a minute it shut off and thereafter was as it was with the screen not coming on, but nevermore to show the Asus logo. Not unlike my father after his stroke!

Since I knew it was dying, I was diligent about backing up information and data. In fact, the only thing I lost permanently was three days worth of iTunes play information since it died just after I synched my iPod shuffle, which I do every three days, but before I shut down iTunes and saved the database library and XML file, which I do every 2-3 days.

I've posted before how to retain iTunes information and transferring it to a new computer. The key is the "iTunes Library" itl database file and "iTunes Music Library" XML file, both of which are automatically created when iTunes is installed. To retain the latest information, those files need to be saved regularly, and I save them online in a cloud so they're not affected by a dead computer.

Also, once I had the new computer, I immediately removed the hard drive from the Asus and bought a casing for it to convert it into an external hard drive, which allowed me to access virtually everything that was on it, so no information or data lost (and attestation that the death was not of the hard drive but of the motherboard).

I wasn't so happy with the Asus, so I didn't buy another one. I still wanted to buy local and the person who replaced the fan in the Asus last summer opined that Acer was currently better than Asus, so that's what I went for.

My new laptop is an Acer Aspire E15, and it's not at all an upgrade. It's a completely lateral purchase. I'm happy about the larger 15" screen, but the processor is a nominal upgrade from an Intel Core i3 to an i5, but I don't notice any difference in speed or performance. If anything, it's slower.

Basically I've just been wanting my new laptop to behave like my old laptop, which means making Windows 10 behave like Windows 7. For my purposes, there has been nothing about Windows 10 that has impressed me as an improvement to Windows 7.

There were things I was unhappy about with the Asus and learned to live with (trackpad), and there are things I'm unhappy about with the Acer which I'll have to learn to live with (even worse trackpad, I'm using a mouse half the time). Lateral purchase.

The only difference is that the Asus was dying and the Acer is new and not about to die. I'm not sure I can recommend either, nor do I have fatal complaints about either. But if I was in the U.S., I'd probably have bought a U.S. machine.