I’m in PC hell.

Yesterday morning, I used my computer — my beloved Mac PowerBook Pro — to check and answer my mail. A bit later, after I’d fed the beasts, I returned to find it apparently frozen in sleep. So I rebooted it. It bonged and the hard drive whirred, but the screen never lit up. I tried again, and again, and again. I got nothing. When I hooked it up to an external monitor, I got nothing.

So I took it to the friendly local Apple Store. It looks like a dead video card — just as I thought. Unfortunately, they need to ship it out, and I likely won’t get it back for a full week. Boo hoo hoo!

So in the meantime, I’m working on my old PC laptop. That’s not going to be fun. I don’t have access to regular programs, including programs that I use regularly for dissertation writing. I’m going to have to use web mail. (UGH!) The setup is now unfamiliar, so I’ll be doing all kinds of stupid things. Windows will do its usual dumb things like asking me to reboot every few minutes after an update. (Yes, that’s happening already.) The keys on the keyboard are really cramped and hard-to-press. My space key onlyseemstowork intermittently. So I’ll have to fight this machine — like all PCs must be fought. Worst of all, however, the video card on this machine is flaky, so I might need to switch to Paul’s old PC, which isn’t set up how I like in the slightest. (I’m very fussy!)

The good news is that I do backup my whole Mac — meaning that I mirror the entire hard drive to an external drive — every week. (I also backup my dissertation to multiple off site locations on a regular basis.) I just did that total backup on Wednesday night, and the Apple Store did another backup for me on another drive last night. So I shouldn’t lose any data whatsoever.

I do expect to age a few years in this next week, however.