Friday, October 27, 2006

Laptop Troubles

So last Sunday, I developed some computering problems that were rectified yesterday. Since I have a few unrelated stories I want to share, I'll go ahead and split them into a few easy to swallow entries!

As for my laptop troubles... the problem was that my adapter was... broken? There was something wrong with it, and so my laptop battery would no longer charge. I think this was actually brewing for a couple of days. Alice and I were watching Meet Joe Black one night when our DVD player flipped out, so I put the movie in my laptop instead. I ran out of battery by the end and it took me a while to realize that even after it was plugged in, no juice was flowing. I jiggled the connection though, and then it was fine. I figured the cable wasn't fully connected somewhere

The next day though, my computer ran down again, as the thing was plugged in. I panicked slightly and swished the cable around, and it was fixed again. This hadn't ever been an issue before... the connection was always pretty stable, but I just shrugged it off.

Then last Sunday, while I was using my laptop for class, it did a couple of bizarre things. First of all, iTunes blinked out of existence briefly... it disappeared from my quick launch and then told me that it was uninstalled when I tried to open it through the start menu. Then my Now Charging icon disappeared and didn't come back no matter what I did.

So last week I had only about 1 hr of power left in my laptop that I was afraid to use in case I needed it or something. For a while it looked like I'd need to go to Hohhot again to find a repair place, buuuut...

My class was cancelled on Tuesday, but when Alice got back she told me that Mr. Ding said he knew a Sony story here that could at least look at it, but that he would use some of the school's equipment to see if the problem was my laptop or the adapter. The next day I took everything in, but the tests showed that it was my laptop. I was really upset, right?

Thursday morning, we met up to go to the Sony store, where I feel like... they didn't try very hard at first because really Sony doesn't sell my model anymore. Also they insisted that it was probably the adapter. We were ready to leave when I was like "well... did they say if we could check it with one of the adapters here? it's not like all the computers in this series don't have the same parts" and so on. So we pulled everything out again, they plugged in an adapter from one of the T series (which are gooooorgeous and I want one) and ta da. The guy couldn't sell us one from that store, but he predicted a Y380 price tag if we bought it from an electronics shop.

So we ended up in an A/V mall a la that episode of Cowboy Bebop where Jet's looking for a beta tape deck, and guess how much my new adapter cost! Like... Y130, making it officially cheaper than the generic replacement I got off eBay after the original disappeared at the library junior year (and that one broke, remember). So cool. I may get another before I leave just so I'm covered in future eventualities.

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