My Laptop: The Continuing Saga

Evidently, this is my week for destroying things around the house. Or perhaps month? I hope not. Anyway, if you've got something around your house that needs busting, I'm your gal. Give me a jingle and I'll come right over.

The ceiling is all dry and just fine. I'm giving it time to get extra dried out, and then I'll paint over the stained areas. As for the actual matter under the sink that caused all the leakage, I need to assess that at some point, but in the meantime, I can deal with only having cold water coming out of my fauct. And I did replace the faucet in the other upstairs bathroom. I'm not going to let a little dripping plaster and flooding of the kitchen stop my budding career as a plumber.

Yesterday morning I was killing flies. For whatever reason, there are a ridiculous number of flies this year, and no matter what you do, lots of them end up in the house -- I've been killing at least 10 or 15 every day for the last week or so. There was one on my computer screen, so I swatted at it. I missed.

Regular readers of this space know that my computer already has what you might call structural problems. I don't know if those problems contributed to how very much the screen of my laptop did not like being hit with a flyswatter, but the bottom line was, that sucker ceased to function pretty much immediately. The screen developed a jagged line from the lower left-hand corner to the upper right-hand corner. Above the line, the screen was normal and legible; below it, it was a mass of colored vertical and horizontal lines. I knew it was a fatal problem pretty much as soon as I saw it, but I restarted the computer anyway, as you do. It didn't work.

My first thought (after "oh, shit, am I a moron or what?") was "that's it, I'm spending the money on an iBook, switching back to Mac, and not looking back."
We were dedicated Apple computer folks for many years, before my parents were generous enough to buy us a PC back around 1998, and there is a part of us that has always longed to go back, but let's face it: we're cheap and lazy. Switching back to Mac-compatible software and such is a lot of work, and Apple computers don't come cheap. So we've had a series of PCs that live fast and die young, and I was pissed off enough yesterday when my laptop screen died that my immediate plan was to invest in what I believe to be the relative quality/reliability offered by Apple products.

My second thought was to go out and buy the cheapest PC laptop I could find with the things I needed in it and just assume that I'd probably have to replace it in about two years anyway.

My third thought is to go and buy a laptop at Costco. Know what's great about Costco, besides all that potential for disaster relief I was talking about a few weeks ago? When something you bought there breaks, you can take it (with receipt) back to Costco and they'll give you a refund. With computer equipment, this works especially well because two years from the time you bought something? A replacement usually costs about half as much.

Guess which plan I'm going with?

Anyway -- yes, it's true. As soon as I get all my files and shit off my good old Toshiba laptop with the busted screen and velcro-instead-of-functional-hinge arrangement, it will be no more. Oh well. I hate treating things like laptops as disposable, but what can you do?