The Blue Screens of Death has hit! Again. Curse you, Dell.
It’s chilling the way that thing pops up so calm and so blue. It’s inhuman.
The trouble started last week when I used my laptop like a laptop. I traveled with it. Silly me.
I went North to visit a sick friend and I knew the computer would be invaluable. It was, it still is, between BoDs which come and go, slowly at first and then with more certainty until at last, Poof.
My friend wanted to know lines from Lear (gutenberg has the whole text. I also read her some sonnets) and she asked me who wrote a poem about the sorrow of a happy past (Mark van Doren—thank you bartleby.com) She had me look up some of her old friends (google—you know that address). And she asked me about my writing. (my head. I mean I wasn’t going to read her the rough synopsis that has “they go at it like rabbits” She’s an old lady.)
My husband’s theory is that a year in my laptop’s life is like three years for most people’s computers. He might be right. I read books on it, I write books on it, watch movies, do research, hide from my family, write long rants.
Last night I waited through long BoD periods (getting longer. Sob) and transferred everything from the laptop to the internet. Gmail accounts are the way to go for preserving those stories!
Cursing, I rode my laptop to its limits. At this point it is like one of those limping horses that show up in books, an old nag bound for the glue factory. Someone always borrows or steals the poor thing and pushes it far too hard. Trembling and foaming with the effort, the horse will drop dead at any second. It’s always an animal with a good heart in those stories. Pushing itself to its death. Good animal? How about picky prima donna pain in the tuchus?
My computer, blinking and whirring, will eventually click off, never to be heard from again. I will throw it off the deck.
Luckily everything important is saved in other places. Finding all those passwords and stories and information again should be interesting.
I pushed the flickering screen a little more because I just needed to do one more thing….At three a.m. this morning I went shopping.
A Toshiba this time. I hear they’re sturdy. And I’m opting for second day air.
In the meantime, I’ll read actual books and for actual work I need to save, I’ll borrow my children’s computer when they’re not around. And maybe I’ll whimper a lot.
Thank god my husband works in computers. He builds our desktops and fixes BoD for me. He set up a back-up system on JungleDisk so I don’t lose any work (although each time I’m forced to reboot it tells me my trial has expired… and we paid for it! I’ll have to check a different back-up system out…)
I just have to point at the computer, point at him and say, “Fix it.”
He knows the reward.
Dana Marie,
my auntie used to say a woman who owns an old house should fall in love with a plumber or an electrician. “Someone useful.” (I suppose she’d say that about men who own old houses, too.)
Seems to me that a computer technician is about as perfect a catch for a writer as a doctor would be for a hypochondriac.
Lol, ain’t it the truth. I started saying I want a laptop and he started handing me magazines with statistics on the laptop he thought I would want. 120GB hard drive, dual core processor, 2GB memory, 17in wide screen monitor… wait, that is what I wanted…
Hi Kate!
)
Good luck with the new laptop.
My hubby is in computers, too. We have hard drives, servers, switches, cards and other items strewn about our house like a hillbilly mechanic has cars on his front lawn. Exactly one of them runs right, all the time: My laptop.
My desktop is an overloaded, six years old, dual-processor monster with power supply issues. It has extra hard drives and other peripherals hanging off it like the little ecosystem of barnacles and fishies on a great blue whale. But for some reason I do most of my work—and all of my best work on it. There’s something comforting about its bent, dented case, and the happy family of dust bunnies living in its guts. It’s only 90% reliable and noisy as all get out, but I love it.
I was scanning down the blog and saw, “curse you Dell,” and I thought, OMG, what have I done now? Because people misspell my name a lot. But I see you’re not cursing me, just my favorite laptop. I’m now on my third Dell laptop, as of last month.
Like you, I wear them out. Worse, I was getting the BLACK screen of death. Old battery and worn out power cord failure. But I really just needed a bigger, better screen and more hard drive and memory capacity because I’m doing so much cover art now. I’m keeping the old, lightweight Dell just for travel, kind of like having an Alpha-Smart. There really is no hope. A four-year-old laptop is hopelessly obsolete, no matter what brand. I now have three times the machine, at less than half the cost of the last laptop.
Oh, all my friends curse Toshiba and HP. But I figure no company can make as many models as they all do without producing some lemons.