The laptop is dead. Long live the laptop.

[mijan]

So, I got home last night from watching Megaman with coldfireserge and my wife, and booted up my laptop.  I'd taken some pictures of myself wearing (and please don't laugh) but several outfits meant to evoke the stylings of Chris Pine.  The lovely folks over at the jim_and_bones  community decided to have a "Dress like Chris Pine" contest, which I found too funny to resist.  So I assembled four outfits (because overkill is fun), took some pics, and had them ready to submit... and suddenly, my computer screen decided that vertical stripes were slimming. 

Oh yeah.

After a minute of nothing but vertical stripes, I turned off the computer, and was treated to the black screen of death.  That's right, we went right past the blue screen stage, and this bitch was DEAD. 

With the help of the kind and generous coldfireserge , we re-snapped the pictures, uploaded them , and submitted them to the website *just* in time, and then... I got about the business of what to do with the dead laptop.

I called up popefelix , who is known aboard the USS Macchiato as the ship's cyber-psychotherapist (he talks to the computers and makes them happy), but at the end of the night, the declaration was not much more hopeful than a resounding, "It's dead, Jim."  We can get the thing to turn on at this point, but nothing is responsive.  No mouse, no keyboard... even plugging in a separate mouse or keyboard has no effect.

So, it's time for me to face the harsh truth.  Bob isn't quite dead, but he's in a coma, and he's not waking up.  I adopted him back in 2006, so that's pretty good for a laptop, considering how much I've abused the poor thing.  I've dragged it everywhere with me, on planes, in cars, in luggage, to coffee shops, on Army assignments... using it for the valuable endeavors of self improvement and the fine art of motorcycle maintenance writing fanfic.  Time for me to look at my finances (medical bills have been a bitch this year) and buy a new laptop.

Until then... no more fanfic.  *whimpers*  I had so much reading and writing to do!  I'll be online at work, but more work and less play.  Alas... maybe I'll get out of the house and do some stuff.

Comments

[nightshadow-t2.livejournal.com]

If you need it I have a extra subscription for Kaspersky Pro or whatever they call their virus program thing. And one thing in your favor is the sale season is coming up, so they're going to start slashing prices at various times for the next month or so. One of the sales this weekend was 200 off a 500 dollar computer. I think that one was at Circuit city. It was a desktop, but there'll be laptops. It's how I found mine. And there's always the Navy Exchange. They actually have an online store now, though finding it is a pain.

[mijan.livejournal.com]

One thing at a time, but I'll keep that in mind. What sorts of computers are on sale?

[nightshadow-t2.livejournal.com]

Depends on which stores. Give me a price range and the particulars (memory requirements, harddrive space, brand if applicable, preferred core [I prefer AMD over Intel personally.] etc.) of what you're looking for and I bet I can find you a good deal. It really all depends on where you look and what you're looking for. Newegg.com is good too.

Normally the ones in the stores that get the best sale reduction are the models that are going out because new ones are coming in. there's nothing wrong with them, normally. They're just not the best anymore. Occasionally they'll have an awesome sale on one of the new incoming models. But when they do that, they limit the number at each store as well as online I think.

There's this Toshiba for 350 without tax and comes with the option to upgrade the memory to 4GB for a fee. There were also some refurbished Compaqs, but this is only 20 more than the cheapest of those. These are the non-sale prices though. Hmm. here's a listing of sales for Office Depot. Laptops are down the page a bit. Newegg has this selection at the moment. I organized them by price.