Fatal System Error: I haz it

It’s been pretty quiet around the blog for the past week, for a very simple – but expensive – reason: last week, after suffering numerous crashes and error messages, my laptop finally died. I’m fairly certain some vital internal component has simply given up the ghost after two years of fairly intensive usage, but I’ll see if I can get it fixed over Xmas by a family member who knows far more about computers than I do.

Now, on to the expensive bit. With two essays to finish, I didn’t really have time to try to get my laptop fixed or save up for something fancy, so I’ve bought the absolute cheapest thing I could find that would open my essay files and allow me to browse the internet. Yes, it’s a netbook/notebook – the Acer Aspire One. It seems you have to pay an extra £70 or so for a Windows version so I’ve even got one running Linux.

First impressions? It’s light, the keyboard isn’t a great deal smaller than on my old laptop, it’s fast and runs Firefox and OpenOffice with ease. On the negative side, I’m still struggling a bit with Linux. Installing new programs seems to be pretty much impossible because I just don’t know what I’m doing and despite the reams of advice on internet forums, there are generally too many conflicting answers for me to get anything to work. That also means no more PC gaming for me, apart from the occasional hour of Guild Wars on my boyfriend’s computer, but with an X-Box 360 hopefully arriving at Christmas, I’m not too worried about that.

In terms of writing, I’m actually getting a lot done, partly because essays are out of the way and partly because this notebook has far fewer distractions than my laptop did. But an update on that is going to have to wait for another post.