Gidget Lost Her Gadget!

I'm gadgetless for awhile.

The Sony VIAO at home died a week ago last Saturday. I've been nursing it along in Safe Mode for the better part of a week but finally decided, yesterday, that she needed to go "into the shop" for repairs.

Oh, I could've diddled with it some more... installed anti-spyware software, registry checkers, God only knows what else... all, ultimately, in vain. I would've wound up taking it in anyway. I lost interest in the internals of computers and operating systems around 1990. Prior to that, I was the King of the Batch Files, Master of Autoexec.bat and Config.sys, Emperor of Novell and the Great Khan of Industry Standard Architecture. Then the counterrevolutionaries from the former mainframe departments began their counterassault with Windows and I was left, properly, on the dustheap of history.

Anyway, I bought this piece of crap at Best Buy 3 Christmases ago (2004). It wasn't bad, for the price. About a grand. It had a Pentium 4 that ran about 3.6 ghz, a gig of RAM and nearly half a terabyte of disk space. Then it just up and died. No warning. I'd been using it the Friday night before it died with no problems. In fact it even did a virus scan in background while I was playing solitaire on it, and before I'd shut it down for the night. Then, Saturday morning, nada.

So, yesterday morning, I disconnected everything, got the Recovery Disks together and bundled the whole thing into the car. The lad at Geek Squad, which apparently owns a piece of the action at Best Buy these days, was funny and comforting. He appeared to know what he was doing. He whipped out a solid-state hard-drive from a chain around his neck, plugged it into one of the USB ports on the front of the machine and started to run some sort of diagnostics. The machine promptly re-booted. Apparently that didn't bode well for it being a software glitch. Anyway, they would happily take several hundred dollars from me, in advance, and then "see what they can do" which, apparently, would take at least a week.

So, here I am at the office, sick as a dog I might add, with nothing at home to entertain myself with except books, the piano, a 32" Sony flat screen tv with a DVD collection that ain't half bad and tons of junk food just a phone call away.

But I wanted to come into the office today to bang this out... because I just love you that much.

I'll be going home sick soon and might not be back for a couple of days.

Meanwhile, read my friends blogs.

And wish my dead PC luck. Or, send cash so I can buy a new one! (just kidding)