Thursday, November 11, 2021

Sonofa...

 Okay.  I've had this laptop for a little less than a year (bought in January of '21). Yes, I've used it all day, every day, within that year, but...

...it shouldn't be threatening to die on me already.  

So.  Tuesday, I woke up with an incipient migraine--halos, sound and light sensitivity, irritability, and all--and went through my normal morning routine: get dressed, get the kids up and fed, get the kids' school lunches made, just...get shit done, y'know?  And then, I sat down with my laptop to surf the news and check email while I drank coffee.  

And two minutes after I started using it, it quit being able to access the internet.  It's done that a couple of times, now.  I started out with turning the wireless card off, then back on.  Then, when that didn't work, running the troubleshooter.  And then, I tried the restart.

Only...it froze.  And then I got a blue screen announcing that Something Was Wrong.  And Please Wait while the laptop tried to repair itself.  

It spent the whole day at 0% done, on a blue screen.  

FFFFFUUUUUUUCCCCKKKKKKK!!!!!  

I had two finished first drafts of two different novels on this damn piece of hardware.  And several finished short stories.  I can't just...toss it.  So, we've spent two full days trying to get the stupid thing to unfuck itself to the point where I can get my damn finished drafts off of it.  And we start trying something else tonight, and it...

...it unfucks itself, and starts.   

I will be spending quite a bit of time grabbing usernames and passwords off this hunk of plastic.  As well as the documents.  Looks like the documents copy over is about 40% complete, at the moment.  And yeah, I'll use it for surfing comfortably in the evening until it dies the final death, but...

I think I'll be using the desktop for the foreseeable future.  I don't think I trust my laptop anymore.  Not even as far as I can throw my car. 

I think I'm going to need another draft book, though--one of the book ideas I had came abruptly unstuck when I moved over to the desktop.  

I am going to have to find my Office CDs.  I don't think Libre Office has the functionality I really need for what I want to do.  

The moral of the story?  Computers may be a necessary evil in the modern world.  However, that does not mean that they aren't evil. 


8 comments:

  1. My four year old laptop has turned into a cantankerous old fart computer. A new one is my wish after the first of the year. I hope this one makes it, and wonder what I'll get within my price range.

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    Replies
    1. I haven't been able to get more than a year out of a laptop for the last several years. I bought the cheapest I could find that fit my needs; if you can, start looking now, and go for the best you can afford.

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  2. External harddrives are cheap these days, just saying.

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    1. I've got a jump drive plugged into a USB port, and have backed up my entire documents folder to it. I am going to check and see if I have enough room for photos and music, now.

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    2. I've got one for movies & photos (2TB) and another (1TB) for doing backups from the laptop. I couldn't do that if memory was not cheap...

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    3. I don't need *that* much storage space...I really don't.

      I am going to have to go through and dump duplicate files, eventually. It's...been a few years since I did that. And several computers. Because I've had one die every year for the past three or four.

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  3. So sorry to hear that. Glad you were able to at least recover your work. Good plan on the thumb drive, that is what I use all the time.

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    Replies
    1. I miss the days of an integrated floppy disk drive in every machine...made backing things up so much easier. Jump drive sticks out of the laptop by about two inches on one side, and even a flash drive sticks out for half its depth. And I have cats and kids in the house, which means that the laptop's always in danger of having something broken off in its bits.

      Delete

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