Laptop vs sandal

I don't lose my temper very often and even when I do it usually blows over very quickly.

Even when I'm out driving and I get cut up by some idiot I'll mutter something under my breath, maybe even give them a dirty look if I manage to get eye contact, but I'm certainly not a road rager or anything like that.

I guess it comes with age, you just shrug your shoulders and get on with it. Water off a duck's back so to speak.

Sometimes though, you've just got to let of a bit of steam. The best way to do that is to take out your frustration on an inanimate object.

Back in September, while I was down in Armidale for a uni residential, I noticed my laptop was starting to get a bit slow. It gradually got more and more temperamental until, one day while running a Windows update it stopped.

Somehow the hard drive had become corrupted and Windows wouldn't run. I could access it by running a command window (remember DOS?) and I could see that all my documents and photos were still there, but it was going to be a slow process getting them all off. There were about 40GB of pictures on the drive and copying them to a thumb-drive one by one would have been really painful. I could of course take it to a repair shop, but that would have cost money.

Well I finally got the laptop running again on the weekend, but that involved reformatting the C: drive where all my documents were. There was nothing really important on there. I have hard copies of all my uni assignments, the only thing I didn't have a copy of was my amateur radio log.

Then yesterday the drive crashed again, this time it was the D: partition, the one with all my pictures on, including about 1400 European holiday pictures that I hadn't yet burned to DVD.

Still, I remained philosophical, there wasn't much I could do about it so I might as well make the most of it. I hate Windows, but a Mac is too expensive for what you get, so I decided that since I've lost everything on the hard drive, I might as well reformat the lot and install Ubuntu.

Half way through reformatting the laptop stopped on me again. The only thing I could do was unplug it, remove the battery and start again, which I did. I was starting to get a little annoyed by now, but only a little.

I started again and while it was going I went out to clean some of the animal's cages. When I checked ten minutes later, I sat down on Donna's brand new computer chair and looked at the laptop on another chair and it had stopped again.



The picture above was taken shortly after I said something along the lines of, "You f****** useless piece of s***!" and tried to put a size 8 sandal through the screen.

I now have an Asus Eee PC on order. The hard drive is solid state, so no moving parts there, it runs Linux, so no Windows, yet it'll still do all I want it to. Best of all, it's a lot cheaper than a regular laptop. It only has a small hard drive and no DVD drive, but external drives are coming down in price all the time.

I won't ever buy an Acer again, the computer I'm typing this on is an Acer as well and the DVD drive hasn't worked for ages. My previous laptop was an Acer and the battery was never any good on that.

I'll keep you posted on the little Eee PC.