drwex | Because it's FUNNIER, DAMMIT

The new Dell is en route to me. I'm managing to keep my obsession with the thing down to checking the Fedex tracking page only two or three times a day. Sigh. 26th or maybe 25th.

Meanwhile, we've been using Pygment's old Mac laptop. It's about 4 years old, nice machine. Macs. Very reliable. Uh... honey? Why am I staring at a blank white screen? **LE SIGH**

Friday night the damned thing bricked itself. Badly. No booting, no lie. Off we go to the Apple store, whose first diagnosis is that it's a fried motherboard.

That leads to the purchase of a new laptop. There's not much point in sinking hundreds into a new motherboard for a 4-year-old machine when it was getting slow and full anyway. New Macs are expensive, mind you. A bit more than my new Dell. But unlike the Dell we can just copy over all the stuff from the old laptop and be up in no ti... err, what do you mean we can't? It's not the motherboard after all? It's the hard disk? Locked up solid, you say? You can't get any data off of it, you say?

Excuse me, I'll be weeping pitifully over here in the corner. Data lost include all the music we ripped to iTunes, two weeks worth of game notes not yet uploaded, a new story Pygment was writing, and all our financial records from Quicken.

(Possible solutions: we have copies of most of the music elsewhere; we have a 2-month-old backup of the Quicken data, plus my compulsive paper record-keeping; the game notes are probably lost, but...)

Today Pygment took the dead hard drive to a data recovery place downtown that claims to specialize in Macs only. That's heartening, and scary - they ought to know what they're doing, but is there really enough of this to keep them in business? And if so, what does that say about the product?

So, um, remember that bit where I wanted to keep expenditures under $1k? Yeah, not so much. We're well north of $3k and still counting.