Once on a donkey in Tunbridge Wells

Okay, so I've now got the hard drive from the previous laptop hooked up to this one as basically an external hard drive without the casing.

So I'm copying my files over (having wrestled with Vista for a while over their stupid "permissions" thing, even though it's scarily easy to override - hey, look, security flaws already!) and I suddenly realise something.

I don't have Microsoft Word installed.

So all those fic files that I was panicking over getting onto the new laptop so I could actually open them and keep writing ... are still inaccessible.

Eheh.

The laptop came with a disc with Microsoft Works on it, but I think I'll dig out the original Office discs instead so that I can have the full versions. They're still around here somewhere. I think.

On the plus side, I've been playing Neverwinter Nights 2, and holy crap, it works like a dream. The old laptop was lucky if it got more than one frame per second - this is seamless. And yes, I am going to keep geeking out about the new laptop for some time to come.

Okay, so when I said that next time I was getting a laptop it was going to be a Mac? I ... kinda got seduced by a certain Toshiba notebook and ended up getting a computer with Windows installed again. And not just Windows, but Windows Vista. Oh, how I have fallen.

On the plus side, the laptop is insanely powerful. It has the dual core Intel processors, and then on top of that it has two GeForce 8600M graphics cards, which mean when playing games its processing power is boosted to stupid levels. I installed Oblivion, set the graphics setting as high as they could go, and it didn't even blink. I realise I am an enormous dork, but I may in fact be in love.

The one real downside is ... Windows Vista. It's a pain in the neck, put bluntly. It's almost impossible to stop the programmes that are set up to run on startup from doing so without installing a programme like TuneUp Utilities that will give that capability. Add to that the fact that it's set up to whine at you every time you don't let it do whatever it wants with updating etc., and this may get very annoying very quickly.

Well, if all else fails, I still have the discs for XP! I'm pretty sure that someone will have got around most of the issues Windows Vista has with regards to user control, so I'll go hunting on the web at some point to see what I can find.

Anyway. Still no data recovery from the old laptop, though. That might take a while longer. In the meantime, I shall play Disgaea and enjoy the geeky power levelling.

(Also, look, new icon! It cracks me up. XD)

My laptop died on Thursday night.

As in really, seriously, is-not-coming-back died. It had noisy error beeps and everything.

And it's been about four months since I last did a backup.

My dad is going to try to fix it and/or extract the info stored on the hard drive, but I'm pretty sure that'll take a while. So in the meantime I'm looking for new laptops (and being shoved at Alienware by my well-meaning best friend whose parents happen to be millionaires, no I am not kidding ouch Alienware is expensive) and, well, mourning. I appear to have been more attached to that laptop than I thought I was.

Anyway. FYI, no fic shall be forthcoming from me for a good long while. 'Twas all on the laptop, see. Like my CV and dissertation and the outlines of several novels and oh yeah, half my life.

:(