For reasons that were 75% work-related and 25% because-I-seem-to-have-trouble-completely-disengaging, I brought my laptop away with us on our recent trip back to northern New South Wales. That laptop dates back to 2007 and can no longer operate without being attached to a power supply, electricity fed through the cord like some sort of dialysis machine. It was slow, only had 1% or so of space on the hard drive left and to top it all off had snot from the kids smeared over the mouse pad that needed the occasional scraping off with a fingernail.
But it was mine and it did the job. It made the journey up north without any problems. However, upon our return, when I went to load it up on New Years Day, as it went through the rumbling motions of startup, I smelled metallic burning. Edging closer, I sniffed around the keyboard, discovering the problem originated at the connecting plug at the power supply. Pulling it out (silly, the plastic was already melting and it was very hot) the metal prong was browned from the heat. This was a replacement head because the other one was damaged last year, but it was a bandaid solution even then, and I knew I could either buy another one to delay the inevitable or accept the situation and begin shopping for another one.
After some research, I nearly, so very nearly, bought a Mac. But Adam knows everything about PCs and nothing about Macs and I admit the lure of having on-site tech support has been a great boon over these years! And to cut a long story short he found a particularly nice bargain online that was within my price range and here I am typing on my new ASUS, taking twice as long as usual because my fingers aren’t used to it and I keep making mistakes.
While the old laptop technically still works, I didn’t want to risk booting it up again unless absolutely necessary – lest it explodes or something – so I transferred all my work (My writings! My business stuff! All those funny gifs!) onto a USB stick to put on here. I’ve been scribbling in hand for this past week, wanting to ‘save’ entering this new work until the computer was up and running. Perhaps I wanted to start everything fresh, or maybe I’m hoping it will be good luck for the year ahead. Here’s hoping anyway. There’s a big laptop-shaped hole in my bank account that needs filling.
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The kids, as you can see, are loving holidays.
Hope you’re all well. Stay safe while we try to get through these heatwave(s). x
