I finally replace my aging MacBook Air.

Back in the days when I wrote books about using computers — roughly 1991 through 2012 — I used to buy a new desktop computer every two years and a new laptop every three years. 2011 was my last big computer purchase year: I bought a 27″ iMac and an 11″ MacBook Air.

I used the iMac for seven years, replacing multiple parts under AppleCare, before it finally got so unreliable — think spurious rebooting — that I had to replace it with another 27″ iMac last year.

The MacBook Air was killing me with its sluggishness. I bought some time my deleting as many files as I could from the hard disk — mostly removing all music and most photos — so there was plenty of free disk space for the operating system to play with. That helped a bit, but so did running only one application at a time. Soon, even that didn’t help much, so I replaced it the other day with a 13″ MacBook Pro.

I still haven’t decided how much I like the new machine. What’s interesting to me is that the new MacBook Pro weighs about the same as my old Air and is the same width — despite the fact that the new one’s screen is considerably larger. They keyboard feels good, but the trackpad just doesn’t feel right at all. It is wicked fast — well, compared to its 8-year-old predecessor.

Oddly, back when I wrote about computers for a living, I really looked forward to getting a new machine and setting it up. Back then, it took a lot of work — digging out installation disks, manually re-entering configuration information, troubleshooting little problems to make sure the new computer worked just like the old one. These days, setting up is a lot easier with basically all the software available online for download and configuration information copied from iCloud or elsewhere, but I dread doing it. I bought this computer on Monday and it sat on the countertop on my kitchen island waiting for me to open it, which I finally did this morning.

What do I use my laptop for? Mostly blogging, emailing, and keeping track of my accounting records, etc. when I’m traveling. But this laptop should have enough power to edit 1080p HD video, so I can get more videos online without being a slave to my big computer up in my loft.

I’m hoping I have an old laptop sleeve that’ll fit it. It would be a shame to scratch it up.

This blog post, by the way, serves two purposes:

• First, it’s a test for my installation of MarsEdit, which is my blogging tool of choice. It looks like it’ll pass the test.
• Second, it’s a test for my actual blog, which has been having permalink problems for the past three months that have been resulting in broken links and missing files. I’ve really got my fingers crossed that it works the way it should. I have a lot of blog posts that need publishing; if this works right, you’ll see a flurry of other ones over the next few days.