Casualty

It's sort of funny, I suppose, that the computer that I've written pretty much every permanent residence post on would expire before the tale reaches its conclusion. On Monday night, after being put to sleep for a couple of hours while I watched Contagion on the shiny new Blu-ray player, it never woke up again. Just some blinking lights and a fan whirring. It wasn't even two years old, and had already had the fan replaced after only eight months.

The man at the computer repair shop declared the motherboard dead and a cost $450 to replace it, before even thinking about labour and overheads and so on. Given the money I had paid him just to look at it, he suggested I might as well buy a new one. So here I am, on my third new laptop since 2007. The man who sold me this one on Thursday morning all but admitted to me that the build quality of laptops is going rapidly downhill and that the major companies don't really bother about it since they know this will generate further sales. Charming. I took the new machine to the place the old one was yesterday, and they transferred everything across. A call this lunchtime to tell me to come and pick up, and an afternoon of tinkering and customising I'm roughly where I was on Monday night.

So I made a promise when I picked the new one up yesterday: if this one breaks inside two years, I'm going to the Dark Side, computer wise....