Melanie and the Laptop Gremlin: The Saga Continues

Some of you may remember the incident of which is never spoken involving one black Gateway laptop and one toasted memory disk that will never be unlocked unless I am one day able to send the great black paperweight to NASA one day to piece its memory back together. The great black paperweight is sitting at the bottom of a great plastic tub, waiting for the day when I will send it to NASA. Five years of my life is contained in that laptop. Don't think for a second that I won't send it in when I am independently wealthy.

The great Blue Dell paperweight has suffered a similar fate, however in intervening years, God saw fit to grant Melanie the Jump Drive technology, and the files were saved from the invading computer version of AIDS that the poor, blue victim caught in Guatemala, apparently by way of Thailand (at least the virus seemed to think it was from Thailand). The red stick that we shall now think of as the Blue Dell's black box is safely housed in my closet in a plastic case that does not move unless there is a dire emergency.

There was a dire emergency.

The not so great Red Dell XPS, which is only a year and a half old and six months outside its warranty, has been fritzing, pixilating, streaking, and spontaneously shutting itself down. I did a file dump on all the works in progress onto the red Jump Drive and, still under deadline, mind you, with 3 chapters to go on the Tarot book, handed my poor limping baby over to Smartie Computers (we do not mention the Geek Squad. We believe the Geek Squad is the Devil), and luckily, we did not receive back a smoking wreck of a black paperweight this time (did I mention that Geek Squad is the Devil?). I wholeheartedly recommend Smartie Computers to anyone with troubles, he was very nice, and very timely, and very easy to get ahold of, and very smart, and very forthright. I waited on pins and needles for 24 hours, and lo, it has happened again! The laptop gremlin hath smote my baby! They did the best they could for it, but, unbeknownst to me, this particular model Dell has suffered some similar problems. My video card is all but shot! This video card is hard-soldered into the Motherboard.

...

THE Motherboard.

...

SOLDERED.

...

So, I'm going to try to get this poor thing to limp through November....

... and then I'm either getting a new laptop, or a new Motherboard. Or both.

That leaves the score at Gremlins: 3 Mel: 0.

-Mel