Back from Laptop Hell

Hello sexy people! I'm back online.

The sad state of my laptop has frustrated me greatly in the last two months or so, and effectively taken me out of blogging recently. It was just too difficult to get online.

First it was a virus. A particularly malicious thing that took over in the background and made it progressively harder to do anything productive. It damaged my Windows operating system so severely that it would take me several attempts and more than an hour to just boot up to read one email. (An hour that I spent wishing painful torture on virus writers.) It got so frustrating that I almost gave up.

Then my built-in wireless card died. Just died. So, I ponied up and bought an external wireless PCMCIA card. It helped, but not enough. It dropped the connection constantly!

I got frustrated, and then gave up.

Giving up was actually liberating, and ultimately solved my problem. I knew I had important files backed up, so I just went for it. Risky as it seemed, I formatted my hard drive to kill everything dead. Then I reinstalled everything, starting with Windows. Finally, I trashed my new wireless card and bought a better one. Viola! I have my laptop back. It boots quickly, has lots of open memory, and connects solidly to the internet. Heaven.

I guess there's a lesson there generally about being willing to risk everything to gain. Or something profound like that.

I'm back.