What is a writer's worst nightmare? Writers block? Rejection slips? Well for me it's having a laptop crash, Outlook go crazy and AOL dump saved messages...never to be seen again...all in one week. That is the time you want to scream. I did, but no one heard me. Fortunately I was alone, because the words I uttered weren't warm and syrupy. I would have done a sailor proud.
After spending a bit of time licking my wounds, I hustled over to Best Buy, where my salesman Jaime was wonderful. He walked me through my various options and we selected the best laptop for my needs. Then came the tedious job of resurrecting all of the files from (whew...thank goodness) my external hard drive. I also learned that Windows 7 Home Premium, while much better than Vista, doesn't support several things. To do that you have to upgrade to Windows 7 Professional providing a little more ka-ching for Microsoft.
If you find yourself in that position, don't buy the actual upgrade if you are only upgrading one computer. It is $199. You can buy a download key for $89 saving more than 50%. Better in your pocket than Microsoft's. Of course you don't get a CD, only a nice piece of cardboard with the number, but who cares? It works. Know what it does? It let's you run some programs and support on XP. Yep. Back to what we had before, but we had to pay Microsoft to get it.
Okay, after a week of fiddling, swearing, transferring, learning and more, I'm finally back on track. Devil's Dance and The Devil's Due are being typeset for the galleys and I'm a happy camper. I actually have the time to write again, and am getting on with "Welcome to Paradise," a government fiasco embezzlement romp being co-authored with Meredith Holland.
By the way, I forgot to mention that the laptop that crashed was my "ailing from the day I got it" HP. The first time it crashed it was only 13 months old and it devoured it's motherboard. Fortunately I had a 3 year replacement warranty. I thought it would be replaced after three crashes. That's what the salesman told me, but no...it had to crash a fourth time for the replacement to kick in.
I bought an ACER as a backup, because there was no way I could trust the HP not to crash again. How right I was. During the next year and a half, it ate two more motherboards and a hard drive. Now all I needed was for it to crash again before May. Can you see me dancing around chanting, "Crash...Crash!"
It accommodated me, I now have a new Dell, courtest of the warranty and some additionatl money, and will never buy HP products again. Within this 2 1/2 year period I buried this laptop and two relatively new HP printers. My complaints to HP fell on deaf ears, so "Sayonara, Baby." You won't be seeing any of my dollars again.
That's all for now--
Arliss
