My new computer arrived . . . but the hard drive is dead.

It's (most likely) not the manufacturer's fault--Amazon had been shipping out this particular computer with insufficient padding in the boxes, which was causing hard drive failure. They stopped shipping to correct the problem THE DAY AFTER my computer shipped.

They're sending me a replacement, and I have a label to ship the defective unit back.

But I can't tell you how disappointed I am. I was REALLY excited about this. I hope the replacement comes quickly.

Also, I decided that the new computer's name will be Aristophanes. When it gets here.

Cicero, my crappy but well-used Acer Travelmate, has been slowly disintegrating ever since I bought him almost four years ago. First, right out of the box, there was something glitchy about the bootup that would sometimes prevent the system tray from showing all of the programs that were running in the background. (I never did get that one fixed--I've been working around it all these years.)

Then the hardware problems kicked in. When the computer was still quite new, that bright splotch appeared on the screen and wouldn't go away. There was a scary period when the fan got cranky and the computer kept overheating, but magically restored itself a few days later. Then I had to replace both parts of the power cord at different times, because they're so poorly made. Then, when the computer was only a couple months out of warranty, the touchpad stopped working altogether.

Yesterday, the hinges that hold the screen broke, and now it's a balancing act to get it to stay up, when I can get it to at all. I'm pretty sure this is the result of carrying the computer around a lot this semester but that was pretty unavoidable, and really, it ought to be able to hold up to that, if you ask me. Also, his battery capacity is down to half of what it originally was. (I used to get a good four hours . . . now I get less than two.) But that's just the inevitable result of age, I'm thinking.

Also, it has the STUPIDEST design--the button that turns the wireless on and off is on the front of the computer, so if you have the computer in your lap, it's ridiculously easy to accidentally shut off the wireless. Why is it stupid?

So, yeah. I don't recommend Acers. I will never buy an Acer again.

Anyway, I fear Cicero is on his last legs, and I'm pretty worried about being left computer-less in my last semester of college with two theses to write.

I'm working with my mom to pull together funds to buy a little netbook (a tiny, very portable laptop, which will be perfect for me), but it's going to be hard, since there's all the expenses of graduation coming up (train tickets and car rentals, not to mention incidentals). But, the computers I'm looking at are within the $400 range, so it's likely I can come up with it. (If not, Courtney has generously offered to let me borrow her old PC for a while, so actually I won't be left computer-less no matter what. Which is a very good thing.)

I've narrowed the decision down to two models of Asus Eee PC: the brand-spanking-new-still-in-preorder 1000HE, or the 1000HA.

I don't have to make any decisions yet, since I don't have any money yet, but I'm still going to ramble here to try to work it out. See, the 1000HE is obviously a better choice--it has longer battery life (7 hours seems to be the realistic report), a better keyboard, and a few other nice extras. But, it costs a little more, and it's still in preorder, and although theoretically it should be literally starting to ship any day (at which point the cost will go up even more), reports are kind of varying about when it will actually ship, and I'm worried that there won't be a large enough stock. I don't want to be stuck waiting for months--kind of the reason I'm looking at an Eee PC at all is that I need something relatively soon.

On the other hand, the 1000HA has almost all the same features, in a less advanced state (4-5 hour battery life, a keyboard with a weird right shift key, and less cool extras), and it's not in preorder. And Amazon has a pretty sweet discount if you buy one together with a case and extra memory. (Extra memory on a computer this size is a pretty good idea.) But, it seems kind of dumb to buy an older model when there's a newer (and legitimately better) one out.

Anyway, like I said, it's a moot point since I don't have money yet. But I had to type all that out, because it's been running around in my head and dammit, I have a lot of homework left to do that won't get done if I'm distracted by tiny tiny computers.

Poor Cicero. I feel kind of bad trash-talking him and using him to ogle other computers. He can't help that he was made crappy, and he's served me as well as he can since I've been in college.

(The electronic kind. Although there is currently a dead vole outside the door to our house, left there as a gift by the neighborhood cat.)

Dammit. My cheap Vietnamese mouse just gave up the ghost. (The wiring was coming apart where the cord connected to the mouse. At first, this meant that half the time when I clicked, it would doubleclick, which was pretty annoying. Now it's finally broken altogether.) This is a bad thing, because my touchpad has been broken for a long time, which means I'm now left without any easy way to move the cursor on my computer. I'm using Windows Mousekeys for the moment, but that's not highly functional, especially since it runs on the number pad, and since this is a laptop, that's built into the keyboard, which means EITHER using the mouse OR typing, but not both.

I can go buy another mouse at the bookstore tomorrow, but I'd rather not, because last Thanksgiving, I discovered, to my surprise, that the problem with my touchpad is software based, not hardware based. I learned this because I happened to have my finger on it while the computer was booting up, and the cursor was moving! But, a few more programs loaded in the taskbar, and the mouse stopped working.

So, I wanted to try reformatting or reinstalling Windows, or something along those lines, but I wanted to wait until Christmas Break so that if I screwed it up (likely), I wouldn't be left computer-less mid-semester. But I forgot to take my portable hard drive with me, so I couldn't backup my files, so that was out.

Anyway, now I'm reluctant to shell out twenty bucks for a mouse when I'm pretty sure I could make the touchpad work with a little fiddling. (On the other hand, the touchpad still doesn't work in safe mode, so I'm not really sure what's going on with that.) I guess it would probably be hard to fix anything without a working mouse ANYWAY, so I'll probably just suck it up and buy one.

It's annoying, though.

Also annoying: the fact that I'm behind in EVERY CLASS, and still having trouble motivating myself.

Nothing like waking up from not enough sleep on a morning when you have to scramble to do homework before class starts and you have a quiz, to discover that Firefox has completely forgotten you exist.

It ate my bookmarks. All my settings. Every single customization (and there were a lot of them, from extensions to customized search engines). I could scream. I restored the bookmarks from a backup, and I don't think I'm missing very much, but a couple of those extensions that got eaten also had information in them. I had been using an extension that stores websites you don't want to bookmark, but do want to come back to next time. I'm most angry about using that one.

The thing is, this is the third or fourth time Firefox has done this to me. I keep using it, because I really like the program, but geez! Not cool, Firefox.

EDIT: Damn, it's worse than I thought. Firefox completely changed the way you find custom search engines to add, so while I figured out how to add Wikipedia, I can't for the life of me find Google Images, Google News and Google Maps, which were all in my custom search bar before. I tell you, much more of this and I'll have to find a new browser. (Except then I still wouldn't be able to accomplish what I want to, so it'd be a little pointless.

So, that was an adventure. My train out of Colorado was delayed by three hours when I got on, and by five or seven hours at various points during the trip. I missed my connection in Chicago, so Amtrak had to put me up in a hotel, and I missed my first day of classes. At least I'm finally here.

Now I have class in the morning, and I haven't unpacked at all, and my computer's acting up--I do NOT need this right now. It's being really slow, and it sounds like it's working really hard even when I'm barely doing anything. I'm afraid something got knocked around during the journey. And I had to force a shutdown, and even though I shut Firefox properly first, Firefox ate my bookmarks and all the tabs I had open! Dangit! I had a backup of my bookmarks, but it was a few weeks old, so I lost all the cool knitting patterns I found over break. Seriously not cool, and that bookmark eating this is a very bad habit of Firefox's. And, of course, I'm also worried about Cicero. I can't afford computer problems right now!

So, I was going to catch up on my friends list tonight, but I'm too tired and stressed out and exasperated. So, maybe tomorrow. Hopefully Cicero feels better then.

So, another yucky aspect of the train ride that I didn't mention in my novel was that my MP3 player started spazzing out around midnight, which was exactly the sort of stress I didn't need at the time. So, I just put it away, and I didn't get around to trying to fix it until today.

My first impulse was to reformat it, in case it was just the songs themselves being corrupted or something. (I had some sort of vague suspicion that it might be rebelling with me for filling it up to within 10mb of its little 1gb limit.) However, just reformatting didn't help anything. It kept garbling songs up and randomly shutting off on me. So, I got on the manufacturer's website and, following their advice, reinstalled the firmware. (A term I wasn't familiar with before this experience--you learn new things every day, I guess.*) That seems to have taken care of the problem.

So, now I'm listening to music, just to make sure it's really okay. Except, now I'm remembering why I had been avoiding listening to music before; when I listen to music, I have this tendency to sing along, dance, or at least mouth the words and bob my head. Which is fine when I'm by myself, or in the company of my roommate, who is at least as goofy as I am about these things, but it does make me look rather silly.

I can resist the urge . . . I can do it! ^^;



*I may not be highly knowledgable about matters of computers, but I fortunately possess the ability to learn most things quickly, provided the technical level isn't too high. I once managed to install Linux on a laptop, even. That was an utter fiasco, but the installation did work--the fiasco was trying to get back to Windows afterward. I wonder if that means I know just enough about computers to be dangerous. Hm.

On Wednesday, as I was packing up to leave the library, I put Cicero, my laptop, into his case, and while I was fixing my backpack, the computer case fell off of the desk to the floor. Emma = panic! O_O But the computer seemed to be fine for about an hour and half after that. However, while I was reading--while I wasn't even touching the computer, it made the most pathetic little "pwww" noise and shut off. Emma = PANIC. I turned it back on, and just as I finished logging in, it did the same thing. I let it rest a minute, then booted it up a third time, and that time it was fine.

I described this to a Geek Friend (do you know how hard Geek Friends are to find at an all girls' school?), and she said most likely the fall had hurt my fan, so my computer was overheating. She told me to turn it off NOW if I didn't want a big melty mess inside the computer. Emma = OMG.

So, my roommate graciously offered to let me borrow her laptop to finish my Project of Doom (post about PoD pending). And today I got on my manufacturer's website to file a form to send the computer in for repairs. Emma = noooo! Only . . . just as I finished submitting the request, the fan started running. And now, I really don't know what to do. The Geek Friend was never able to confirm that this was the problem, because she said she couldn't find my diagnostics. (This is the same Geek Friend who was making fun of my computer for not being a well-known brand. It's an Acer, which she had never heard of.)

So . . . I don't know what to do. If it is a problem with the fan, I really need to catch it now before anything serious happens . . . but at the same time, this is a VERY bad time for me to be without a computer for two weeks. (Why do these things always happen at the end of the semester?) robotfactory, I don't suppose you have a magic button to make everything better, or something?

Be advised: I'm not getting comment notification e-mails. I changed the address for them due to the amounts of spam on the address I was using, and . . . it doesn't seem to be working yet. I mean I got the new address confirmed, but so far none of the test comments I've posted have given me a notification. So, until that gets worked out . . . no e-mails.

This goes for GreatestJournal as well.

EDIT: LJ comment notification seems to be back online--w00t.

EDIT #2: GJ comments also up. Double w00t.

Anybody know why my computer would randomly stop playing sounds? I reinstalled the driver (from my cd), and it did seem to work--at least, when I rebooted, it played the shutoff noise--but now it's quiet again.

I'm flummoxed.

EDIT: Okay, I think I have it working, but now when I adjust the volume (my laptop does it through the function and arrow keys), it doesn't show the little bars on the screen to say how high the volume is turned up. More driver trouble?

So, I got a message saying that I needed to install the latest version of Macromedia Flash Player. And since I'm actually on a fast connection right now, I figured, sure, why not. So, I installed it, aaaand . . .

Now nothing Flash works. Nothing.

I even upgraded Firefox to see if it'd help, but no dice. I've uninstalled Flash player, reinstalled it, made sure my browser was closed--I don't know what to do.

I had this problem once before, but I can't for the life of me remember how I fixed it. Any suggestions?

You know . . . spyware protection is a good thing, and I love having my computer in working order. But I'm running Microsoft Spyware, Spybot S&D AND Adaware, and . . . frankly, I'm getting kind of tired of every time I install a new problem having to confirm five different times that YES, it's okay for that program to be there, even in the OMG startup registry.

I think the spyware protection programs are also messing with the little e-mail utility I run. It's supposed to run when my computer starts, and it does, but sometimes it doesn't appear in the system tray like it's supposed to. I have to go into the task manager and close it there, then open it up again to get it to appear. And it needs to appear, because if I don't see it there, I don't know if I have new e-mails.

Alas.