A pint of water was on my left, my little Netbook on my right.
Right hand was holding my Blackberry to my ear, my left hand…knocked the pint of water over my Netbook.

I pulled the (now empty) glass of water up and just stared at the Netbook. After 30 seconds, the Netbook just died.

I pulled out the power cord and the battery. Moved the Netbook to a dry location. In my inebriated state, I put the battery back into the Netbook and hooked up the power cord. Turned the Netbook back on but the screen didn’t show anything but blackness.

Panic.

Turned everything off and dragged it to Myke’s the next day. He looks after the Netbook.

The Netbook lives to be tortured another day.

Hardy little things, they are!

I got home at 5pm and have been sat in front of Lappy ever since.

My day so far has had 17 hours in it and I’ve spent 13 hours and 15 minutes of that time in front of a computer. No wonder my back hurts.

It started, then choked. I left it a while and eventually rang up my local computer shop, who told me to bring it ’round and they’ll try and sort it out.

A few hours later, I get a phone call from them; Lappy’s basically brain dead (he was working so hard to fix the error that the SP1 install had made, that the hard drive kind of keeled over and died) and needs a new hard drive and would I authorise this? I authorised it.
They don’t work on Sundays and it’s like, 20 minutes before closing time, so they’re not going to start working on Lappy today but will start working on him first thing on Monday morning.

On Monday, I expected a phone call, telling me that Lappy is ready to go home but the call never comes.
Tuesday lunch time, I ring them to find out what the status is and stuff and they say that he’s ready to go home now. I ask my step dad to pick him up and take him home, which he does.

What an expensive “free” update – it cost me £100!

But. She ruined it. Her laptop died. Basically, the colours had managed to invert themselves and you couldn’t access Windows at all – not even in any of the Safe Modes. I reinstalled Windows and installed some software which inverted the colours back (until I could figure out the problem and fix it). I went to connect it to the internet via our LAN connection but although it would recognise and connect to the network, it wouldn’t take a blind bit of notice of the internet.
I restarted it to enter the BIOS to see if I can fix that little colour issue and it appears that BIOS has buggered off and left me. No matter which buttons I press, I can’t get to it.

But none of this matters because now the screen has gone “weird”. Everything looks really faded and washed out, even when I change the screen settings to SUPER DUPER HIGH CONTRAST.

She’s really upset about it because she’s now lost all her music for her iPod. I think I might just make her unwrap the RAM for Christmas, before sending it back.

I didn’t know if it was the program for the graphics tablet which had started it but decided to remove it anyway. Just in case.

It’s all completely removed but I’m still getting random Blue Screens.

Is Lappy too warm? Blue Screen.
Did Li move Lappy too quickly when shuffling around? Blue Screen.
Has Lappy been on for more than four hours? Blue Screen.
Has Li had Photoshop open for more than half an hour? Blue Screen.

I think the Blue Screen I’m getting is the same Blue Screen I got on my old laptop…when the RAM had corrupted. But of course, it could be a software problem.

I’m not sure where I stand on this: can I take Lappy back to Tesco (where I bought him) and get a refund? Will they pay (which I think they should, since he’s less than a year old) for him to be looked at and, if necessary, fixed?

For now, I’m off to make sure that everything is backed up onto my external hard drive and anything important, put onto a few CDs and my USB sticks. (You can never be too careful!)

This One Day is also the day where I’ll try and do something with my site, whether it’s (re)add a page or write an entry.

However, MY One Day also seems to be a lot of other people’s One Day and so, my internet connection speed is pathetically slow. Dial-up is probably faster than this.

Myke started nagging me in about November to get a new laptop and, at the end of January, I finally gave in to his nagging and bought one.

Everybody, meet Lappy:

Lappy is an Acer Aspire 4315, bought from the big Tesco in Plymouth, for £300. Lappy’s operating system is Windows Vista Home Basic, he has 1GB of RAM (which will be getting upgraded once my bank account is looking healthy again) and an 80GB hard drive.

We’ve been getting along really well. The only problems I’ve had so far are silly little things like finding the ‘Restart’ option and how the ‘Shut Down’ button doesn’t seem to actually shut the computer down (it just makes it go to sleep!). I love the new start menu and I love the software I’ve never had before (Windows Photo Gallery being one).

I was worrying that my programs might not be ‘Vista compatible’ (I remember hearing about people having problems installing some programs on Vista) but all but two of them installed (and work) perfectly.
The two which didn’t, AVG and ZoneAlarm, were freeware programs and I found Vista versions available on the websites.

I love Lappy!

My laptop’s been having…issues for a while now – it started with the laptop becoming increasingly slower (it takes 20 minutes – on a good day! – to start the damn thing up!) and then it started having a small overheating problem. Because the laptop was slower, it was taking longer to do things, which meant that I wasn’t able to do much until it decided to turn itself off.

But all of that has been changed now! I bought myself a new laptop! (After having Myke nag me about buying a new one since…November? He nags well for a boy.)

So, yep, I’m back. I still have very little spare time on my hands but I am back and I will be blogging more often.

Now it’s developed a NEW problem.

It’ll get hot, then hotter, then hotter again, then…it’ll turn off. That’s it. No restarting or anything, it just dies.

Damn you, Dave the Laptop.

I turned it back on. An hour later, it turned itself off again after getting another bloody blue screen.

So I uninstalled the RAM again, turned the laptop back on and…no internet. I restarted the laptop, unplugged the router, then plugged it back in and unplugged and plugged the internet box.
Nope; the laptop had decided that it wasn’t going to connect to the internet.

So I went to bed.

Got up, woke up, turned the laptop back on and plugged back into the internet and this time it would connect.
Great, now my laptop thinks it’s a bloody teenager.

I got sick of the (lack of) speed, so installed the RAM again. Blue screen, bleating on about memory. Uninstall the RAM, look up “paging files” – maybe too much memory is being given to the paging file?
So I did my maths and according to the site I found, the minimum should be the size of the RAM installed (1280MB) and the maximum should be 1.5 times the size of the RAM (1920MB). I did that, restartet and … blue screen.

Then I turned the air blue…

I’ve uninstalled the RAM again and I don’t think I’ll be reinstalling it again. I don’t seem to be having any problems without the extra RAM (…other than the slowness).
So I don’t think I’ll be up for making graphics or doing pretty much ANYTHING I normally do because my laptop can no longer handle it.