The laptop is dead, long live the laptop

Those of you who read Phill Barron's recent laptop-related posts may notice a certain, shall we say, zeitgeist developing in the Scribe-o-sphere, for I am going to tell you the story of my afternoon, and laptops are going to feature prominently.

My faithful Dell Inspiron had been getting a tad long in the tooth. It was approaching two years old, it needed a memory upgrade if it was to continue being a viable gaming machine, and one of the screen hinges was damaged. I'd already decided to replace it in the next few months, probably with another Dell, when it started throwing frightening hard-drive-related errors. "I'd better back up my data sharpish before the drive goes completely," thought I, as I was powering the machine down and retiring to bed on Thursday night. I remembered this to-do item early this afternoon when the machine suddenly crashed and refused to reboot. Oops.

I'd intended to spend the afternoon deciding what to do for the Red Planet competition. Instead I spent the afternoon in PC World buying a new laptop. It's a Compaq, it's got loads of RAM and a nice graphics card, it's thinner and lighter than the Dell, but now my wallet is also thinner and lighter. I could've done without all that thinning and lightening. Bah.

Oh well, it could be worse. I don't think I've lost too much data, especially since my email is all stored on the Gmail server, and I suspect a bit of patchery-pokery will resurrect the Dell long enough for me to get everything important off. But heed ye my warning, fellow bloggers -- a curse does blight the humble Scribe-o-sphere. Despair of your laptops, for their end be nigh!