Me and my computer have had our ups and downs. It started when I bought it. My first mistake was buying a Dell. Now, I have come to love this Inspiron 1501 notebook, but it is a conditional love. It seems like Dell make their AC Adapters intentionally bad quality. I’ve already been through two official ones, two eBay ones, and finally I have one I bought from a website which seems the best quality of the lot, and it’s not even Dell branded (though it somehow miraculously works with this computer – more than I can say for the second adapter I got after about 8 months of use). Anyway, when I first bought it, it came with Windows Vista Home Edition. Worst operating system I’ve used since Windows 3.0. Blech. So I “downgraded” to Windows XP after a week. After that there were some debacles with the AC Adapters, and basically the hinge of the computer is stuffed. It’s coming apart at the side, though I admit I didn’t use it carefully.
I was playing Sonic 3 & Knuckles on it earlier, and I paused it to go with my sister to buy a new computer (more on that shortly). When I returned, it was off. I picked it up and tried turning it back on. The light popped on and I heard the fan start, then it switched off immediately after that. It felt hot. Really, really hot. I don’t know what the Genesis emulator did to it, but it was really overheated. I was worried, and let it sit for a while. Fortunately, once cool, it worked again. Better that it powered off instead of melting something, I suppose. But, it scared me quite a bit. I don’t want to lose this computer in the way I lost my IBM a couple of years ago. That one developed a design flaw that caused the monitor to go blank, and when my uncle was tinkering with it, it died completely. I was just lucky that I had backed up the hard drive when the bug first started to make the screen intermittently go blank.
So, anyway, I went with Allyson today to Harvey Norman, and she bought an Asus Eee PC for her next trip – she is going to America to be maid of honour in her friend’s wedding in San Diego.
It is a 7.8 inch (I think) netbook that runs some version of Linux. It’s really user friendly (well, once we got over problems with the wi-fi), and came with OpenOffice.org, Skype and Firefox already installed. I think it is excellent! But I can’t believe my sister got Linux before me!
Oh well. Anyway, it’s been an interesting day. Now I need to spend my evening working on my comic, which I haven’t been doing, instead procrastinating with Sega games (I got Hyper Sonic in S3&K, that’s got to count for something!). My nephew Jake is eager to read it once I’m done, so I have to make it, if only for him.
