Technology...arghhhh

Well, my old laptop is dying, it is only six years old. It's name was Dell Inspiron 9200. It has been through two major surgeries in it's brief lifetime, in 2006 it developed a problem with vertical single pixel lines. It took some work, but eventually this problem was fixed. Dell finally conceded that the problem was not a limited problem, but a series problem and replaced the screen for free. That took some major lobbying by any anonymous person who created a website devoted to that problem on the internet and the hundreds of people who added their same problems. My precious laptop lived another two years when this past November the hard drive started to fail, the hard drive was replaced in another major surgery, but this didn't take. It was a lovely machine, it's lived in The Netherlands, Pakistan and now Australia -- so you couldn't say it wasn't well-traveled. But I had hoped it would have a longer life span.

I decided to replace it, which believe me, was hard to accept. So I went online and found a PC that was half the price of getting an equivalent laptop. Even considering shipping costs. When I got it I was soooo happy, I almost immediately started putting it together. I looked at the power output it was 100-127/220-240, yippe no transformer needed! Well, for the past 10 years I've had laptop computer that automatically switched between power voltages. Well, I plugged my lovely (if BIG) PC into the wall and pop. I knew immediately what I'd done -- I'd blown the power supply. S--T, I swore very loudly, Darlin' came in wondering what had happened. I was concerned, this was a brand new computer, it was a major pain bringing those heavy boxes from the APO to my car and into the house. It was a major pain unboxing everything and setting it up. I didn't know what to do, I was depressed. Plus my lovely sister Darlin' had left and I would see no more family until Christmas. So when I went back to work I talked to the lovely men in the IT section at work. They said that's easy, won't cost more than $30 AUD to replace the power supply. But I told them I had no clue how to replace a power supply -- they took an old computer they were retiring and showed me how to do it. They told me where to go to buy one.

So this weekend I went to the computer fair -- found a lovely man who sold me a power supply and I put it into the computer. It worked! I'm using it now. Now, the love for this new PC hasn't come to me like it should, but hopefully over time it will become as beloved as my old laptop. Though I haven't completely given up on it. I want to take it somewhere to see if it can be fixed for a reasonable price -- cross fingers. If not I'll take the hard drive out and destroy it and recycle the rest of it. But that would be so sad, we've been through a lot together.

But I can do without anymore technology issues for a while. For quite a while.