It’s that time. I’ve entered a new and frightening and very risky stage of life; I’ve started looking for a new laptop. I’m thankful that my friends have kept me in their thoughts and prayers throughout my ordeal.

The consumer electronics market is a lot like modern art: faddish, nonsensical and so focused on the new that it doesn’t bother trying to make things work unless the “Next Big Thing” hasn’t shown up. In terms of providing a positive consumer experience, the only way Beelzebub could have designed it more to his specifications is if the screen squirted highly caustic acid into your eyes every time you made a spelling mistake.

I’ve had my current machine since I graduated from high school four years ago. It runs Vista and I’ve never had any problems with it. Unfortunately the battery doesn’t hold a charge anymore, and it weighs more than some pieces of furniture I own. These are liabilities in a field like journalism, because most editors frown on a beat that only includes places with outlets.

Research is difficult and is not aided by the people paid to be on staff at tech magazines writing reviews. I’ll be reading an informative review about the different colors I can get this laptop in, all the features I can get, like Bluetooth, HD screens and the lifetime’s supply of driver CD’s I’ll never use because I’m looking at netbooks which don’t have optical drives. Important things, however, like battery life and price have been left out. I really don’t want a computer that performs like the overachiever on the back of a Doritos bag, but lasts as long as the Doritos in the bag.

No, what I really want is a MacBook Air. Unfortunately, I was told in a class last week that I need to start saving for retirement now if I don’t want to spend my golden years in a cardboard box, hunting stray dogs for food, so I guess I can exclude the Air from my options.

No, it’ll have to be a netbook for me.

Before I started looking at the laptop market, I didn’t believe in the tyranny of choice theory. I always figured that more choices were better, and that if you disagreed you could go to North Korea and see how well they get by with limited choices. But there are as many different kinds of netbooks out there as there are stars in the sky or angels dancing on the heads of pins. Even narrowing the field down by my criteria – battery life, price, weight and ability to further world domination plans – only reduces the choices to a few hundred Asus and Acer machines. Not that I have any world domination plans, it’s just a good criterion for a computer system.

Of course, as I was looking, Google comes along and announces Chrome OS netbooks to be released later this year. Since all the heavy lifting is done by Google’s servers and the thing is just a browser, it should be cheap and have good battery life. Then there was the Consumer Electronics Show 2011 and the host of tablets cascading down from development departments. I was drowning in a tableau of tablets.

Then fate came along and it turned out that most of them were, like last year’s non-iPad tablets, pieces of junk.

Even within my price range there are still millions of permutations of computer configurations, each one changing as often as Lady Gaga’s costumes and just as bizarre. If I use one of those customer service chats like Dell has no matter what configuration I ask about they always say something like, “That’s our super-premium configuration. Buying that one will liberate a Middle Eastern country from its long-lasting dictator, restore portions of the rain forest, ensure your children are accepted into the colleges of their choice and make you a smarter, more handsome man. Dell recommends Windows Seven.”

If I got really drunk and instead of logging on to the Dell chat by mistake I went on to Omegle, I’m sure the person would end up saying something like this, “You can thrust your love-rod into the new standard USB 3.0 and the FireWire Ethernet will be all the hotness you’ll ever need. Dell recommends Wind-Ohhhhs Seven.”

However, my liver is still pretty good. Maybe I can trade it to Steve Jobs for a MacBook Air.

Matthew M. Robare is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].