What's the most disappointing thing that has happened to you while writing?
My old laptop which I had had for around two and a half years crashed and burned this past Sunday, right when I was in the stride of my whole writing every day thing. Diagnosing the symptoms (vertical line artifacts visible on POST screen as well as during the loading of any OS, graphic drivers unable to initialize resulting in any OS crashing as soon as it tried to enter a high-graphics mode, Windows BSOD indicating that the problem was some sort of memory failure, the problems continuing even with the hard drive removed and booting off a verified working Ubuntu boot disk) led me to the conclusion that, at the least, the graphic's card RAM had gone bad. That is not something that can really be user replaced in a laptop as in the vast majority of them, even with dedicated graphics, the graphics card is built into the motherboard which would thus need replaced.
Well seeing as how I had to go back to school on Tuesday and sort of need a computer for school, sending it in for a repair that could take several weeks or even months was not much of an option. The laptop was out of warranty anyway, so it still would have cost money that way. The only real option I had was to go and buy a new laptop using money which I don't even have now and probably won't have for months still. After searching online and seeing that the laptop I had picked out on Newegg was available locally at Best Buy, I picked up this fancy new HP HDX 16. I sort of hate to say it but it pretty much blows the old Asus A8JS out of the water. It's shinier, has a bigger screen (by two whole inches diagonal), better quality screen, better keyboard (plus a dedicated number pad!), a lot better looking and shinier, better CPU, far better graphics, double the memory, and did I mention that it's extremely shiny and nice looking? The old Asus was one of the ugliest laptops I've ever seen next to the old Dells and Thinkpads, but this one's so shiny! Seriously, I knew it was shiny before I got it and even when I saw it in the store but after unpacking it I was like ZOMG this thing's going to blind me with shininess. X_x The only things I don't like about it are that despite the bigger screen it actually has a lower resolution than the old one (1366x768 vs 1440x900) and that said screen uses a 16:9 ratio (like an HDTV) instead of the former standard of 16:10.
As I mentioned, though, the failure was not due to a software problem and so the hard drive of the old laptop (which was newly upgraded last fall out of my own pocket...) was salvaged and all my data, including fics, was easily recovered. The big disappointment was that this lead to a three day gap in the whole writing every day thing. Okay, so on Tuesday I actually had the new laptop and could have technically written, but that was when I moved in and I was far too tired to write. I had been expecting that, just not the two days before when I had to go without a computer to write on. -_-
So yeah, in the end that's not as bad in terms of fics or writing as the ones where you people actually lost stuff, but I lost my beloved laptop (Well, we had been starting to break up). And $1000 I don't even have yet. Thank god for credit.
The good news is that through my writing yesterday and today, I feel that I just may be able to finish this chapter at least by when classes start on Monday. Potentially, tomorrow will be the last part that needs written in the chapter leaving Saturday free for proofreading.
