I got a new computer yesterday, hand-delivered from the steamy jungles of the Land of Enchantment. After rounding up the needed other parts yesterday (going to take a little getting used to the shift key not being where I expect it), I got things up and running without difficulty. I took a break for some tea, and said to myself, “self, I sure hope the laptop has some more good years in it, now that you’ve bought a desktop machine.” I took my steaming mug of caffeine back to my work table and opened up the laptop.
Obviously the gods of computing (very difficult to tell from the demons of computing) were listening, because at that very moment the screen did a little flickery dance and the computer froze up.
Moments, mere seconds before I started to copy files over to the new machine.
I already knew what the problem was, but this time things were going much more badly. My guess is that the sparks and general bad things that happened before have caused other damage to the video controller. I managed to get things working, more or less, by removing the back of the road warrior and tipping it up on its side while it ran. After poking at the video card and wedging a matchstick in at a critical point, I was able to keep it running well enough that I could access it over the network and begin moving files.
Did I start with my writing, or my software projects? No, of course not. The match stick was working, things were under control. Instead I moved a bunch of junk I wanted to burn to DVD and get out of the way. The hard drive was getting very full, and affecting performance.
Things have become dramatically worse. This morning the Road Warrior can’t run for more than a few seconds before the video problems freeze it up. It can’t even finish rebooting. Finally I disconnected the video controller completely and booted it. I can’t see the screen, but I can access files over the network.
I don’t think any amount of duct tape is going to solve this problem. My blogging software is still over there (I really want the mobile machine to be my blogging platform), so I’m adding this entry the old-fashioned way. None of the usual bottom-of-the-entry links are going to work right, except the comments, which I hard-coded.
Now what I want to do more than anything else is go somewhere and write, but I can’t.
Edited to add: I have the blog software running on the mini now, so the automatic stuff should be restored. I have tried to keep the hard link to the comments here:
There is a chance that uploading this will blow away the entire blog if I didn’t move the data over correctly. That would really suck.
