We had a little bitty power outage in my neighborhood last Sunday -- only about eight hours or so -- and when they got the power up the power surge fried my Mother Board!
It didn't do the Bluebird a lot of good, either.
Here's the Good News: I 'had a feeling' about this, so I bought a brand new Laptop the week before. In part, this was so I could have a backup computer in case my el-cheapo refurbished 3-year-old desktop (aka "My Baby") ever bit the dust.
Good timing, you say?
Here's the Bad News: I had got the laptop the previous Monday. By Wednesday I was convinced that VISTA Operating System was a whole lotta sucking going on. Thursday I started looking for someone to do the technical stuff involved in replacing VISTA with XP. Friday I got the laptop (and a $100 copy of XP Home, on disk, which you can't hardly find in Corvallis anymore) to the lady who agreed to do the job.
But she couldn't get at it until last night, which is why I have been suffering from Blogging Withdrawal until today.
Which is why I can FINALLY get back to blogging again, now. Well, I also had to buy an Optical Wireless mouse ($32.95 at Staples) to avoid using the ever-to-be-cursed touchpad these flat monsters come with.
Total outlay, just a little bit more than I paid for the Desktop a few years ago.
But was I happy? Nooooooooooo!
While I was talking to the guy at the PROFESSIONAL Technical Johhny store (the computer hospital, where I probably should have taken the laptop), I casually asked him about an ACER computer I had seen at Tiger Direct dot com. Found out why TD won't answer any trouble calls on an ACER desktop after 30 days of purchase; mainly, because their innards are all proprietary and if something goes wrong the only recourse is to box it up and send it to ACER. Not good.
"So, what kind of desktop package can you put up for me with say, 2GB memory and a 250GB HD, kinda set up for multimedia/internet and real fast but has XP Multimedia OS?" I casually asked.
We ended up agreeing on just over $700 for the new puter, with a memory-chip bar (so I can put SD chips from the Geek DigiCam directly into the box for downloading files) and also install the HD from my old desktop as a second HD. Also, prepared to accept a router for when I want to use my laptop (now designated GeepPuterJr) at home in a WiFi Internet connection. He 'threw in' the cost of the post-mortem he had already done on the old GeekPuter, and promised that GeekPuterII would include no proprietary components, a better power supply so it would resist power surges better, and would be ready by next Monday at the latest.
Since I couldn't buy either a new STI Open Gun or repair the Porsche (blew the transmission 2 years ago) for that kind of money, I figured it was the right way to make sure my children will be really sorry when I die because there's nothing left in the "Mad Money" account at the bank (also known as my Primary Checking Account).
Tonite I'm typing this on GeekPuterJr, and I've convinced myself that investing in GeekPuterII was a wise investment. This teensy keyboard is really hard to type with. I've already rewritten this a couple of times because the keys are so close together my fat fingers keep hitting the wrong key. That never happens with a standard keyboard.
I've thought of so many things I could be blogging about over the past few days, I've forgotten some (most) of them by now. But at least I can check my email, see what the weather will be like tomorrow, and read the other bloggers that I like to keep up with.
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