There’s one for the calendars, eh?

I’m getting this feeling that December is Laptop Obituary Month. For the second time in two consecutive years (I wish I were joking), I’ve had a laptop die on me in December. Last time it was a hinge fix, which was repaired under warranty (the laptop died 10 months later, giving it a total life of 18 months). This time, my laptop simply would not turn on. Nada, nihilo, nothing. Power light and fan light came on, and it sat there buzzing the fans. No POST, no BIOS, no response to keyboard input. Nothing.

The good folks at TigerDirect honored my warranty quite neatly, dispatching a cheque in the mail, and it is thus that I was able to purchase my new machine (from them- why vary from what works?). I have, in the mail, therefore, a new laptop, an upgrade over my old one in every way- granted, the screen size is smaller, thus the maximum resolution is lower, but depending on how much you like lugging around twenty pounds of laptop, that could count as an upgrade as well.

It comes with Windows 7, so I guess I’ll give that a try when it arrives (Is it really the 7th one? Windows 3.1, 95, 98, ME, NT, XP, Vista… and that’s if you start counting at 3.1 and ignore 2000. Shouldn’t they have done the logical thing, fleshed the list out to nine prior versions of Windows, and called this Windows X? Or would that get confusing with Mac OSX and XWindows?).

I’m going to keep an open mind, give Mister Gates and associates a chance to win me over (or at least talk me into dual booting), and play an awful lot of Star Wars: Battlefront 2, as that is the one game I really, really want to play on Linux that I really, really could never get working.

’til the new machine arrives, of course, I am confined to borrowing familial laptops and/or using my server as a web browsing box. Neither is entirely satisfactory, but either, of course, is better than nothing.

I’ll keep you all posted- and mark your calendars. December is Laptop Obituary Month from here on out.