ANOTHER Catastrophic Computer Failure, and CES

So this has been a fun week.

As you may recall, yesterday I suffered a catastrophic computer failure when my laptop decided to (I believe) lose its graphics card to some unknown hardware issue. I got myself set up with an older laptop as a backup, and all seemed pretty decent.

Until this morning.

THAT laptop ALSO died. ARGH!

So I had to go out and get a cheap NEW computer to replace those two, because I do need something to work with. Ugh. Not really what I needed right now, but at least I'm back up and running... again.

I ended up with an HP Pavilion p7-1418. It's a desktop, which makes it very cheap, which was very good for me, and since my original laptop was getting a bit older by now, it actually represents a little bit of an upgrade in some ways.

So a fiasco of a start to the week AND to the new year, but some good came of it. The job search is truly kicking into high gear now though. Unexpected expenses like that really hurt about now.

In other news, it's CES (the Consumer Electronics Show), and that means my duties for GeekBeat kick in. I am stepping into the shoes of Dave Peterson, our lead editor, while he's off at CES with Cali Lewis and John P, covering all the news that's fit to cover that they can fit into just a few days. I'll try to get some writing done this week, but it won't be tonight, that's for sure. Not after the last couple of days I've had.

Catastrophic Computer Failure

Unfortunately, the title of this post is not in reference to a new sci-fi story I'm planning to write. At least not yet. I may have to do something with that in the future.

Nope, I woke up this morning and turned my computer on, as usual. Instead of the BIOS display I'm usually greeted with, though, I got 6 short beeps in succession and two absolutely blank screens. This was repeated a number of times, and my ipad was consulted for what the significance might be.

After much research and fiddling around inside the laptop, but mostly because of the research, my best guess is that the graphics card in the laptop is toast.

Sometimes I really, really hate computers.

I've got a semi-viable backup computer in the form of an old laptop, and several truly useful backups in the form of Dropbox and Carbonite. Thank you profusely to the fine folks at both of those companies. Since the issue is the graphics card (I think) and not the hard drive in the machine, I'm sure all my data is perfectly fine, but I can't access it.

I can keep on writing though, because I do keep all of my writing projects in folders that are regularly and redundantly backed up online to various places.

As soon as I have a regularly paying day job again, I'm getting TWO computers. Redundancy FTW.