What is there to say about busted PCs?

I have a 2008-era HP laptop that I refurbished last year. Threw in a giant new hard drive, added RAM, put Windows 7 on it…I dropped some money on the bad boy. I’ve been using it with a dual monitor setup to get my work done, as it makes editing (and writing) infinitely easier.

Except the screen conked out last night, coincidentally after My Brother, the Computer Killer, was playing with it. I took it into a small, local shop this morning, and the repairman thinks it’s either the actual LCD light or the connector on the motherboard.

So it’s fixable. It’ll cost some money, but not as much as I dumped into it, and I should be able to get another couple years out of the machine.

“This never happens with Macs,” My Brother the Computer Killer grumbled.

Well…yeah, it does. The screen problem in particular isn’t limited to PCs. I worked with Macs at my magazine job — cruddy eMacs and big, beautiful new iMacs alike. The new ones are gorgeous machines. With that said, they can have problems, too. I’d had two happy, working PCs for at least eight months. Something had to go wrong.

So I’m working steadily with the little machine, missing the big machine, and wondering when I became so dependent on computers. I do remember the years immediately before machinery became so important. I feel like I was less stressed during that time (of course…that could have been because I was a kid not yet in middle school, too).

I’m trying to work out a decent schedule for myself, while at the same time looking out for additional freelance gigs and possible part-time work. The productivity quest continues…