NotSheep

We have a few laptops around the house, received from a variety of sources, all of them, with one exception, acquired second-hand. Our first was bought in 2002; we were planning on moving overseas in 2003, so a portable computer seemed a good investment. It took a lot of abuse. It got bounced down a flight of stairs. It got crumbs and liquids of various kinds dropped on the keyboard. It even had a wooden bread-board dropped on the keyboard (it broke the “1″ key, but Scratchy scavenged a replacement from an old laptop at work – okay, so it was a different colour to the rest of the keyboard, but I didn’t care). And it survived.

Until… twelve hours before we were to put the family on the plane to move. I walked past the bed, where the laptop was sitting. I tripped over the cord and pulled it to the floor – and the screen went black. That laptop had so much information on it: our flight details, telephone numbers, the address where we were spending our first few days, our car-rental booking, banking info… I had to go to my mother’s house, where our desktop pc was, and plug it into the monitor there so I could copy all the details onto a notepad.

For the first few weeks after we moved, we rented a house from the boyfriend of a friend of mine. He offered us a spare monitor so my laptop was usable, though no longer portable. Then we bought a house, and put the laptop and monitor into the rec room in the basement. We moved into the house on a Friday. On Monday, our shipping was delivered, and all the boxes were placed in the basement. On Tuesday morning, we woke up to find that we’d had a flood – water was gushing from the dishwasher connection. There was about 30 cm of water in the basement, all of which had poured through the ceiling from the main floor, where there was still more water. Most of what we’d shipped was soaking wet, much of it destroyed.

Not the best day of our lives.

I don’t know how much the insurance claim came to in total; I know it was in the tens of thousands for the construction work, without even starting on the contents. The entire ground floor of the house had to be re-floored. As for the basement – even the walls there had to be taken apart, dried out and rebuilt. The insurers were fantastic; they sent in a clean-up crew immediately and worked really hard for weeks. The guy in charge of the clean-up crew picked up my laptop and water poured out of it; he sent it to be dried-out in case we could salvage data, but wrote it off and arranged for a replacement (the lone new laptop mentioned earlier). Since my laptop had been a few years old when we bought it, the replacement had far better specs, as well as being smaller and lighter and, in my opinion, quite wonderful. A few weeks later the old one was returned along with the other items which had been dried out. We borrowed a monitor from a friend, plugged in the laptop and, once we remembered the password to log on, discovered that it still worked

The replacement laptop is still being used, but it’s four years old, and it’s been abused even more than the one it replaced. The screen surround is broken in two places, the cover is cracked, and it’s having a few minor issues in its functioning – the most pressing one being a fan that works only when it feels like it. Scratchy’s taken it apart and rebuilt it twice, but the fan still isn’t functioning reliably. We could replace the fan, but the cost of the part and the labour would be more than half the cost of a new laptop…

You can see where this is going, can’t you?

So we started looking for a deal, and I have just taken delivery of a shiny, new laptop. It’s much bigger than the one I’m using – the screen is probably twice the size – but I wasn’t going to be able to find one as small as this at a price we could afford, so sacrificies had to be made. But… don’t expect to hear much from me for a few days, because I’ll be busy getting rid of Vista and moving all my stuff over.