I'm slogging away on the 4 + year old emachine laptop since my 1 year old Toshiba laptop decided to give me a blank stare the other day. I'm pretty sure it's the video card since the bugger goes from black to dark grey as if it's trying to show but can't. Good news it pooped out 2 days before the warranty was up so I'm sort of saved.
This emachine is prone to over heating--which I find out AFTER I buy it--which is why I bought a new laptop. Everything has a weakness. One of mine is chocolate but that's another blog :}
SAVE what is typed immediately! Silly me, I worked on little stuff here and there thinking no problem and then I can't see a damned thing. I've 3 pages edited on a work for a friend, some flash fiction pieces, photos I haven't copied over--get the picture? No, me neither! ARGH!
I'm usually anal retentive about saving anything new I've done, added, etc, but I forgot, got lazy, didn't think it would happen to me, fill in the blank. *sniff*
There's oodles of places and gadgets to keep your sanity from being pulled out with your hair when something like this happens. Check out the list:
Email: I send my recent stuff to my gmail account, I can retrieve it and it's fairly safe. Gmail is free, over 7 gigs now, and will hold quite a lot. I think Yahoo and AOL are hefty too.
CD/DVD, R & RW: these are pretty cheap from 700 MB to 8 gig in bundles of 10-50 at about 10c each and with the rewrite if you wipe it you can reuse it. Copying over same-name files is simply drag and drop.
USB drive/memory stick/disk-on-key: whatever you call it it's that thumb-sized doohickey that can hold up to 12 gig or so at about 10-20$ per gig. I had the unfortunate experience of getting a bad SanDisk that had some damned virus that created numerous folders with 000000000 as the name, filled with 50+ more files of the same name. Deleting them didn't work, using antiviruses didn't work, it was a flaw in the hardware chip and not something that I could fix--or trust so now I have a Verbatim and an Apus.
External harddrive: 40 gig for about $80 here, (converting shekels to dollars), can be used with any computer, doesn't take up much room at 2" wide x 6" deep x 8" high.
I'm hoping the repair folks don't have to wipe my memory to fix my baby.
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