Hooray for my Netbook!

Yesterday I woke up and turned on the computer, thinking to check my email before I headed off to do errands for the day. The computer that sits on my desk and never goes anywhere is a laptop, because that was the only intel-chip computer in my price range in February when my four-year-old computer gave up the ghost. The computer made the usual chunking and whirring noises it makes when it is booting up - but the screen was white with slowly moving brighter-white lines, like a mobile white-on-white plaid. Then it turned grey. I could still hear the Windows welcome noises, I just couldn't hear anything. I rebooted. during shutdown, I heard all the usual sounds and noises, and this time during start up, again it sounded normal, but on the screen there was no white, just grey. It's at the repair shop now. I suspect the video card.


Some of my writing files are saved on the desktop (including my website files, my accounting files, and my ideas folder), and I really hope I don't lose any of them. It's interesting how many files you don't need until they're inaccessible. I miss all my internet shortcuts. I miss the auto-login cookies, and hope I can remember how to get into my new twitter account. I needed to find a book in my library yesterday evening, and couldn’t remember what it was filed under, and then realized my library catalog was on the computer’s desktop with my writing files. (My library is close to 5,000 books, about half catalogued, and takes up a goodly chunk of two rooms in the back of my home.)

The good news is that I still do have internet access on the netbook I got for carrying back and forth to college. It’s small, but it does work, and hopefully I’ll have my “real” computer back, with all the files on it, within the week.

The other good news is that all my manuscripts are still safe on their flash drive, and work on Deadly Gamble won’t be slowed by this…obstacle.

Ironically, one of the errands I was doing yesterday was buying a new flash drive to put the rest of the writing files on, to get them off the hard drive and available to me wherever. Would it have been too much to ask for one more day of working screen?