Last night, my favorite laptop crapped out on me. First, it inexplicably put itself into airplane mode, and wouldn’t let me switch it back to wireless after a half dozen attempts. Okay, that was annoying, but I thought maybe a reboot would let it find the signal. Nope. All it did was give me an ominous DOS level error message, and refused to boot. Not even the rescue thumb drive was able to get it to boot.
Called a local computer and cell phone repair place earlier this morning, and dropped it off for them. They did a perfectly respectable job replacing the fan on it that shot craps several months ago, for a very fair price. For all I know this could be anything as simple as reinstalling the OS, or, at worst, needing a new HD.
Since the machine that is in for repair is ~5 years old, I ordered a new one from Dell. I had to customize the one I wanted to triple its standard RAM, but otherwise, it had all the specs I wanted. A RW CD/DVD optical tray drive was a must. I’m not going to use all the 1Tb HD space, but that’s standard on this model. It was thin on RAM, though, so I had to upgrade that. So, Dell won’t be shipping an “off the shelf” model from a warehouse, but I will get what I want. Given the 11% sale promo discount, and the additional 10% cash back from Ebates, it’s a pretty good deal, even with state sales tax.
In the meantime, I’m using a ~7-8 year old laptop that’s running Win7 Pro. Hey, it still works. It’s fast enough, but it’s only got 8Gb of RAM, and I’d forgotten how much I dislike its keyboard. The keys are plenty big, but I really miss having a numeric keypad, and if one of my bracelets skims the touch pad, it screws up whatever I’m typing. Anyway, it works just fine.
Hopefully, I’ll hear back later today from someone at the repair place with a diagnosis. Unless it’s as simple as reinstalling the OS, I’m going to have to approve the repair estimate, anyway. They don’t have carte blanche.
In other news, Ozzie is curled up next to me on the sofa, purring up a storm. Even someone who is allergic to cats can’t help but like the little guy. He’s so affectionate. Once the girls realized he wasn’t going to challenge their authority, they decided to tolerate him, and leave him alone.
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