I brought the laptop to Dad’s house yesterday so I could get some work done during the conference championships. The ENTER key was stuck, so I pried it off, found what had been causing it to stick, removed the offending object (a small, white rock–no idea how it got in there), and now I can’t put the key back in its setting. Now, if I’d like to end a paragraph, I have to press a small, circular piece of plastic about half a centimeter in diameter with my right pinky finger. Needless to say, this has slowed down productivity.

To complicate matters further, my computer crashed when I got home. I turned it on, and after the Gateway screen and Windows screen, it went to the “You screwed something up so pick one of the following configurations for startup, as if you know the difference between any of them, moron” screen. I picked a configuration. It flashed a Blue Screen of Death so quickly that I couldn’t read the error message, and rebooted the computer. It proceeded to the Moron Screen again. I chose a different configuration. Same result.

It was time for a manual shutdown: hold down the power button until the laptop shut off. So I held it down for five seconds. Then ten. Then fifteen. It wouldn’t shut off. It kept going through he cycle of reboot, Moron Screen, Blue Screen, reboot. In fact, the Moron Screen had a timer on it, so if I chose to do nothing, then thirty seconds later it would choose a default configuration and go through the whole routine again. I couldn’t shut HAL off.

After about twenty minutes of this idiocy, I managed to shut it down. I don’t know what I did differently; maybe it was waiting for my anguish to rise above a certain point before showing mercy. I had to do a “System Restore,” which took over an hour but thankfully did not erase my old files.

I tried to copy my most important files onto flash drives, to make sure that if this happened again, at least I’d have a copy of them somewhere. But the newly restored system wouldn’t let me copy multiple files at once. It also wouldn’t let me archive multiple files for quicker-and-easier copying. I had to individually copy each file from the laptop and paste it into the flash drive window. That only took the better part of two hours.

So I’m in the market for a new computer, six months ahead of schedule. If anyone has a brand to recommend, or knows anything about Macs, please do share.

1 Comment

Que Si Says:

I want a Mac!

February 8th, 2008 at 10:44 pm