It was an ordinary Friday afternoon and I sat down to do yet another hard days work. Our consultant was waiting on a file or two from me. I wanted to get it done before I left for the day. I’ve been working on the file since mid-morning and was getting ready to finish up and email it when my computer froze and became unresponsive. One half of one of my monitor was pinkish I should have taken a picture but had left my camera at home. I thought oh that’s odd its never froze like this before… guess the computer just crashed so I rebooted since I had no choice in the matter. I rebooted, nothing, the lights were on but nobody was home. Black screen not even a blue one. I called the IT guru downstairs she came up and tried to reboot. Nahdah, she unplugged many of the devices and rebooted…nothing. I took the computer downstairs she tried it down there still nothing. She said I’ll bet that its the motherboard. I took it to the IT tech few doors down he did some troubleshooting but all he had was trouble no response from that tower of blackness. I figured after a minute or so that the beast would not be working for me today so I was trying to locate the new laptop. My Boss had it out in the field. The laptop had given him the blue screen of death. I figured that there was nothing more to do and simply wrapped up a few phone calls and went home sulking, wondering if it was the hard drive and what this would mean to some files that I hadn’t saved to the server yet. Today I heard from the folks who are fixing it that the motherboard went, died, kapooie, gone… done for. Why? I didn’t do anything special to it, it just up and died. I’ve been using, fixing, and doing all sort of wonderful stuff with PCs for years mainly Dells never had one died on me. This is a HP machine and fairly new at that and the board is gone. I’m staring to get worried that my colleague’s machine is next in line for said motherboard failure since she has the same exact model. Perhaps I got the bad one out of a million who knows. I’m told the beast will be back tomorrow or Thursday. At least I’ll have a new motherboard. Hope nothing else goes wrong anytime soon before I get a new one. Perhaps the next time I’ll be a pisser and insist on getting a Dell. Maybe I’ll raise some real stink and demand a Mac Pro yeah that would go over well 
until then its me and the little laptop that hasn’t given me the blue screen of death yet although it boots up really slowly for some odd reason.
I ventured out in the cold today… Had to get a few food related items so I jumped in the car and drove in the sleet to stock up on a few good things. On my way back in the comfort of my pad, I noticed that my mailbox was full so I decided to pick up my mail. I came back in unpacked my groceries, cooked up a fine meal and sat down to eat all in that order. Since the paper was on the table I decided to see what was in there… I passed the usual coupons and noticed a Walmart catalog. Yes after holding out for so long we now have a Walmart in town. The Samsung 32″ HDTV for under $900 on the front did catch my eye… Then I turned the page and I saw some laptops “pre-loaded” with Vista Home Basic and some boxes of various Vista flavors on the bottom of the page. I think they had 4 different versions of home. I shook my head in utter annoyance as to why a company would sell 4 different versions of an operating system, tossed the paper aside and finished up. I think that the cartoon above says it all.
