Ardath Rekha

Last night, my laptop screen began doing a weird flicker with some wiggles and other oddities. I didn't like the look of it, so I saved everything, told everybody I had to restart, and shut down the computer. It proceeded to stall, freeze up, post a bizarre error message that made no sense, and eventually had to have the shut-down forced. I was able to boot up in safe mode and things LOOKED okay, so I decided I'd do a regular restart and back up my computer just to be safe.

Only that was the last time I was able to start it up. It now turns on, and immediately turns back off, only to repeat that precise cycle.

It's going to Best Buy asap for repairs. Hopefully it won't be too hard to fix. If it needs a great deal of care, hopefully they can at least give me access to my hard drive in the meantime so I can deactivate my important program licenses and back up my documents and media. I'd fallen a little behind on doing that, which is not good.

Although there's a part of me that's feeling very fretful about it, I know it's not as bad as it feels. I'd completely backed up the hard drive relatively recently (I'll have to check when) because I got fed up with some malfunctions and decided to wipe the drive and reinstall everything. So only things since then will be at all affected. I'll probably lose a bunch of chat logs, some email (most of which exists on Gmail's servers anyway) and some downloads.

Well, and some writing files I was working on, and a complex spreadsheet I'd built. That part will be really irksome, but I don't have any reason to believe that the hard drive is the problem; it looked like some kind of freaky hardware/circuitry error. Still. The fact is that even if I do lose some or all of that content, I can replace/reconstitute most of the important stuff.

The fifteen pages of "Magnetic Nowhere" script I wrote on Friday will be lost, but... I know what I wrote. Hell, it's getting to the point where I'm eating, sleeping, and breathing these characters and their dramas, so I can rewrite it in fairly short order, I suspect, and probably even better than the first draft.

So... deep breaths... and soon I go off to Best Buy. Not immediately, though; this would happen on my parents' anniversary so it has to wait until after the anniversary lunch we're having. But I've gotten myself into a frame of mind where I no longer feel like throwing things and kicking my heels against the floor, so that's good.

And I've decided to just bite the damn bullet and (once the semester is underway) buy a bloody desktop again. I'm on my ancient one right now and, while there are lots of things about it that annoy me, I have to admit that it's handled my brand of heavy overusage better than any laptop made since 2003.

The good news: My data is safe. The Best Buy guys (who are made of awesome and have my love forever) will have it all backed up to a portable drive that I can access as of tomorrow.

The bad news: My laptop's motherboard is friiiiied. So the laptop is shipping out to the factory for repairs (it's not only under the Best Buy service plan but also under factory warranty because I bought it on August 30th... so it almost but not quite survived to the end of that).

I will probably see my laptop again in, oh, say, three weeks.

In the meantime I will spend approximately the next week or two hobbled, using my elderly desktop, and then I'll get a new desktop to handle my heavy programs so that I can stop murdering laptops in under a year apiece. Seriously, I've now killed two laptops in two years; I need to rethink this. (In my defense, each time it was the hardware that failed, but it's a strike against me that the failures were all undoubtedly caused by the super-heavy usage I gave the machines.)

So, uh... yeah... I'm back on the elderly desktop for the next two weeks. We'll see what happens after that, exactly.