What is a Memory?

In this article from the National Geographic Society,
Joshua Foer writes about the curiosity that is memory. To illustrate the complexity of which, the stories of a woman who remembers every detail of everyday of her 41 years of existence, and that of an 85-year-old man who cannot create new memories are related.

Of Christmas wishes and needs.

This past semester, my laptop gave up on me. Long story short, the motherboard was replaced practically 10 times within 2 months or so. I was in the middle of my thesis' first half without a laptop. While others around me in the library were clicking and typing away, I was scribbling notebooks worth of notes and quotes. Well, at least I learned.
But I love my laptop. I've done everything on it. All my other papers, photo editing, videos, music, themes, blogs-- everything.
Just the other day, my beloved laptop's screen finally gave up. About a week or so of getting it back from the shop for the last motherboard repair, a line started flickering on its bottom. i call the shop again and am told that it is an LCD issue-- and is no longer covered by the warranty. It would cost me at least 15,000 to have it fixed/replaced. After scouring online and making calls, a guy quotes me 5000 pesos to do it all. At the time, the problem was not yet so bad, so I leave it be.
Time passes and a matching line appears on the top of the screen. And then the lines get thicker. And then the whole screen flickers after every minute or so. And then the flickering happens more often. And then it happens every three seconds-- in the middle of our online class enlistment. Hell. I tried restarting the system-- just in case it helped. It didn't. A little while more, it develops a haze/vignette. Everything is covered by a foggy layer. Then it rights itself. The only issue is the flickering at the top and the bottom-- then hell breaks loose.
Every three seconds, it would freeze and flicker so badly that I held the unit because it had the illusion of violent jerking. I still continued trying to enlist and to update my friends on why I couldn't reply to a lot of the questions about enlistment. I was dizzy. And then to add to that, it developed this Magic Ball effect (as I'd like to call it.) It would swirl out the fogginess in a magic ball kind of way. It would have been awesome if it didn't mean that it might paralyze all my web based acts and connections. And I was enlisting. By the time I printed the last page of my enrollment papers, the flickering and the fogging had gotten so bad that I was nauseous.
My family has decided not to have this repaired anymore, and to just get a new one. Now, I am at a quandary. I usually research a lot before this kind of purchase. Alas, this is practically an emergency.
I have narrowed down my choices to either the Lenovo G550 or a Mac- be it pro or not.
Can anyone give me good ideas about these?

Happy Halloween, you all!