This morning I head off to "work" at the library. I turn the laptop on because I needed to pound out the Weekly Minnesota Sports Survey and continue on with my column.
But it wouldn't turn on all the way. I get a blank screen. Well, I then got an off-black screen; it changed, almost imperceptibly. Anyway, what matters is that it didn't boot up. I had something like this happen recently -- in fact, come to think of it, it was when I was at the Ramsey County Library and saw a bloody booger smeared on the wall of the study room I was in.
That time I just had to shut it off and wait before it was back to its normal self. But not this morning. I shut it off, waited a few minutes and turned it on again, but no pointer, no scroll, no cursor, nothing. I kept repeating this cycle and giving it more minutes to rest, but it wasn't doing anything. Oh, shit.
At least I was in a library. That way I could go online at one of the working public computers and see what was wrong. There were many things that I could do -- just some that I, you know, can't do, such as take apart the bottom of the laptop, or spend $200 on a new motherboard.
But there was one thing I tried once I got home: I unplugged my lap, took out my battery, then held down the power button for 60 seconds. I was supposed to then put the battery back in, re-plug the power cord, and try to turn it on. And sure enough, it booted up just fine, even though the laptop knew that it didn't start up correctly before and tried to diagnose and fix itself.
All well and good, and I used it for a little bit this evening without a hitch. I turned it off with some hope that everything would be just fine. But it wasn't; after I watched the news and took a shower, I turned it on again and boom, Black Screen Of Death. Fortunately that trick of holding down the power button while the laptop had no access to power worked, and this time the lap resorted to a System Restore. Plus, not for nothing, tonight I downloaded 11 important updates; my operating system is Vista, so maybe there was a glitch.
Two other things. One, my computer has been bugging and slow for a while now, though I chalked that up to a combination of old age, our slow Internet connection speed at home, and all the porn I've been looking at online. And two, I just replaced my worn-out old battery (the one that came with my laptop when I ordered it online back in, I think, 2008) on Monday, just as Vice-President Biden and President Obama took the oaths of office. Maybe that has something to do with it.
We'll see. I guess I can continue to just restart the computer by taking out the battery every time, at least until I can afford to buy another laptop. But now I have to take contingencies. If it is the battery, for example, I might have to bring my old battery with me tomorrow and put it in. Or I might just have to go without a battery and plug my laptop in every time. We'll see. But I feel kind of sad that I was all happy thinking that my lap had been "fixed" this evening when it wasn't.
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