Night of the Living Dead Laptops!

Often people will write me emails and ask me all kinds of specific and technical questions ranging from problems with their computer to software to why they're having this problem or that problem. I could understand if they were writing me to ask about bondage or sex related questions, after all, I've put enough stuff out there on those two subjects that if you want advice from a rubber slavegirl, I'm a great resource. How people get the impression that I'm some sort of a computer guru though is beyond me. I consider it a good day when I can find the on button to my computer and the thing actually works. The only conclusion I can come up with is that the fact that I have a website that is oh so beautiful, well designed, user friendly and exciting must translate into the notion that I actually know what the hell I'm doing. In truth, you'll notice that most aspects of my website at maliia.com are pretty simple stuff. No complicated code or wierd floating things across your screen. Not even flash or animations or whatever. Everything there is either pretty basic and straightforward or stuff in which I was able to copy the code from something I liked on another website and integrate it into mine. I'm not saying you shouldn't ask me for advice on computers, you can ask me whatever you want, whenever you want. Just be aware that the source you're going to often confuses her laptop with her toaster oven so you might want a more knowledgeable resource.

I live in great fear that something will go wrong with my laptop. First, if I go a day or two without it I start to experience severe withdrawal symptoms not unlike a heroin addict only far worse. I go crazy if I can't check my website, try to catch up on emails, chat with friends and I'm at the point where the internet is completely wired into my life. It's like we've become one creature, you know like on the science fiction shows where you've got the host creature and the one that lives off of it but they've gotten to a point in which if you try to remove the creature from the host, then the host will die. That might be a bit extreme in my case, but seriously, I get all my utility bills online including my cell phone and I make my payments that way. I do banking, check prices, make travel arrangements, read articles, download songs, get my newspaper online and lots of other things. Without my computer I'd be forced to go back to watching television like they did back in the old days and who wants to do that!

I guess I was really lucky because my first two laptops were perfect. The first was a Fujitsu and it lasted 2.5 years and never had a problem. I had such a good experience with it that I bought another Fujitsu. This one went another 2.5 years and not a single problem. The downside was that the video card was way too weak for the computer and it couldn't be replaced with a better one so the stupid thing was obsolete before I even bought it, I just didn't realize it at the time. Then I got an Acer which is what I use now. I thought it was a great deal at the time and I wasn't going to get stung by a computer with parts that couldn't be upgraded again, except this thing has given me trouble. It was knocked out of commission for four days of pain, anguish and agony back in January when my hard drive went bad. I was lucky that I do regular backups to DVD of all my files, but still they were able to salvage the stuff from the old drive and they gave me a bigger one to replace it. All for the low low price of like $400. Gah, talk about living hell. No laptop for four days and I had to put out all those bucks. That's at least a couple of totally hot fetish pieces to wear!

Ever since I got the harddrive replaced though, something wierd has been happening. Now when I try to place graphics intensive games (I love games, what can I say) like The Sims 2 or Age of Empires 3, my computer will play it for a little while and then just BOOM. Shut down totally. It's as if I hit the off button except I didn't. This happens whether it's cold, warm, running other applications, running nothing else. It's very annoying and it's basically forced me to live a life for the last couple of months without any fun games. How sad for me. Now I could go back and get this checked out. Sure, I could say that it was fine before the harddrive was replaced so they must have fucked something up, but I already know the answer I'll get will either be they have no idea but would be willing to do me the favor of charging me like $200 to tear my baby apart and find out, or they'll say that one has nothing to do with the other and/or when the old drive fucked up, it messed up this other thing whatever. So, with that mentality, I haven't done anything about it and instead too the position that I would just get a new laptop in a few months. That works right?

Well, maybe not. See, today I got really scared. Not quite knife wielding maniac in the house scared but more like mental images of Rush Limbaugh wearing a latex g-string and bra while on a leash scared. Yeah, that mental image frightened me too. Anyway, I turned on my computer and the hard drive started making noise. That's not right. First it was a loud whirring and then it made scrapping sounds, as if the drive were, well scrapping against something. So I did a quick backup just in case and decided that something may be going wrong with this drive too. After all, the old one was making almost the same kinds of sounds shortly before it passed on to meet its maker, or maybe it just got recycled, who can say. I also noticed that the area of the laptop where the drive is located gets extremely hot lately. So either the thing isn't cooling right or its just really shitty design that makes the thing get too hot and then it fucks up the drive. That's my theory anyway.

So what's the point of all this you ask? I may have to replace my laptop sooner than I thought. First, it means I'll have to find one that is of the highest reliability. That rules out a Dell for sure, I've heard nightmare horror stories about those. It also means I'll have to sell this thing, assuming its still working when I go to sell it. For now everything seems to still be running okey and the harddrive has calmed down for now but in my experience things almost never "fix themselves". It would be nice if they would though, I like the approach of sticking my head in the sand and ignoring a problem until it gets too big to ignore any longer. That's about the time that the laptop breaks down all together and I'm stuck going through severe DT's while some guy at the Geek Squad who fixed my computer three days ago continues to hold on to it for an extra few days just so he can access all the porn of me on the old drive. Not that I mind that, but gah, you'd think he could at least give me a price break on the new drive in exchange, don't you?