March 19th, 2007
Laptop in for repairs
Some weeks ago a couple of problems with my Toshiba Tecra M4 appeared, and I’m now without a PC for a while, while the laptop is in for repairs.
The first problem that happened was with the screen, where lots of vertical lines suddenly appeared all across. This didn’t occur on external monitors however, so I continued using the PC for a while. Then, one day, the PC suddenly rebooted all by itself, and when it booted up again, there were glitches and artifacts, even on the external monitor. Windows XP crashed to a blue screen when it came past the boot-up logo. I had to boot into Windows in Safe Mode and delete the NVIDIA driver in order for the system to boot up without crashing.
To make backing up before sending the computer in for repairs easier, I decided to purchase an external hard drive. I went with the Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 250 GB:
I can’t see why I didn’t buy one of these earlier — backing up is so much easier with this than with CDs/DVDs! As for this specific model, I think it’s a great buy; it works great, looks great and is cheap. 
Anyways, let’s hope I get the laptop back in time for The Gathering 2007. I’m going there with many of my friends this year, and I’m really looking forward to it. 
Just for kicks, I did my homework yesterday on an old laptop from 1994 I had lying around, with Windows 3.11 and Word 6.0 on it. It still works great, and it does get the job done. 
Makes you realize just how overkill 3 GHz computers are when you only use them for word processing.
Oh, and it’s my birthday today!
Posted in Personal, The Gathering, Tablet PC