I dropped my laptop.

I’ve owned laptops for over nine years now. This is the first time I dropped one.

And unlike the previous ones, made out of hard, rugged plastics and (supposedly) able to handle a fall, Apple is now making their PowerBooks out of titanium and aluminum. These metals are very light and very, very fragile.

The laptop has two cracks in the casing, bent out bits, and much of the bottom piece has come unglued from the plastic that previously held it on.

It worked (as much as it has been, as I have reported previously) for another day and then last night it died for good. It began beeping, making ratchety noises and a dialog came up that said that I needed to restart now or huns were coming to take away my children (or something to that effect) and when I tried to reboot, it wasn’t having any.

To top it all off, whatever made it suddenly die caused a head crash on the hard disk. Well, I assume it’s a head crash. Norton keeps crashing when I try to fix the drive.

I’ve managed to at least get it mounted and have copied much of my data back. Virtually everything for work (thank GODS!) and much of my personal stuff. The biggest victim is my email but I have everything prior to November 16th backed up so I only lost email in the last two months and I doubt there was anything I’ll need when writing my memiors from that period.

The laptop goes to the repair people tomorrow. Maybe they can get the rest of my data back. Maybe they have special uber-tools that make Norton look like the dweeb he appears to be on the box. Maybe they can fix all that ails it for less than a million dollars.

I think I know why my laptop leapt from my hands and commit suicide. I think it is unhappy about the Dell sitting on my desk running XP. Lord knows I am.

Actually, it’s not that bad. It’s not a Mac which means that things which should be obvious aren’t (it took me forever to figure out how to get the machine to join the workgroup at work. You’d think it would be in networking but, no, it was in the System info panel. It’s stupid shit like that which makes me hate Windows.) Maybe I’ll make myself feel better by installing Linux on the Dell and dual booting.

Anyway, I babble. Ta.