Monday, February 13, 2006

Technical difficulties

I recently bought a cheapish Toshiba laptop to replace my ancient Toshiba laptop (upon which I wrote my dissertation and which is so ancient that it has no modem, even though modems did exist when I purchased it). (And now that I've written that sentence I'm wondering if they're called "laptops" anymore? Maybe I'm supposed to say notebook?) It's true that last May I announced my intentions of buying a Powerbook, but my budget didn't really look favorably on that purchase.

So last night I was watching a couple of shows from the first season of Curb Your Enthusiasm on it. Usually I use the laptop for more serious ventures (like blogging, say), but I had just received the DVD from Netflix, and, being cable-deprived, I've never had a chance to watch this series, which I fully expected to be one of the funniest shows ever. And C. was reading in the room where the more conventional DVD player resides, so I thought I would just hide out in the kitchen with my laptop and have some good laughs.

But the first disappointment was finding that the shows (at least the two I watched: the first one and another one called "The Wire"), while funny enough, were not sufficiently funny to cause me to laugh out loud. So I took out the DVD and left the laptop on the kitchen counter while I went to do laundry or something. A couple of hours later, I returned to find a blank screen. No big deal: computers usually serve up a blank screen after a couple of hours of being left alone. So I tapped the touch pad, tapped some keys. Nothing. The power button was glowing blue, which, I think, is the color it glows when it's on. So I pushed it. Nothing. I pushed it and held it down. Nothing. I looked around in my owner's manual and tried a couple of things. Nothing. I mean, nothing. No sounds, no nothing.

So I closed the top and left it sitting there overnight, the power light still glowing. Finally, this morning, the battery drained itself out and the power shut down, and I was able to start it up. Everything seems fine.

But what was that? Anyone know?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sorry, I have no clue what the problem was. However, I am firmly convinced that PCs occasionally freak out (yes, they're possessed). A year ago I had one that I couldn't get to power up so I sent it FedEx at some expense to Dallas and upon arrival and unpackaging, the tech was able to power it up by simply pressing the power button! Talk about frustrating!! Hopefully, your issue is a non-repeating one.

Donna said...

Well, that makes me feel better. I was afraid there was some obvious thing that I was just missing. But I guess it was just a strange blip (or perhaps a poltergeist).