as taps plays softly in the background…

Mindy, btw, is the Dell laptop I bought a couple of years ago. She was a refurbed Inspiron 1150 but made the last 3 NaNo’s much more doable. But last year, 10 days into November she coded [bsod] on me and only through the resuscitative efforts of palmie and her beau was anything recovered. Palmie shared an ubuntu disk with me and that actually worked and was working fine, but I decided that it was time to give the Windows XP reinstall another go.

Now, mind you, I have hardly touched Mindy since Minnie showed up in January. But now it is June, and Script Frenzy! is upon us (for which I haven’t written a single word to date). I have sufficient credit on my Dell account to purchase a replacement but do I want to go into debt for a second computer I’m hardly going to use except for 2 months out of the year?

This is the quandry.

Yeah, yeah, I know, her harddrive is barely cold and I’m looking at replacing her. I may bring her into work tomorrow and see if our IT guy has any luck with her but I doubt it. the WinXP install didn’t work because of possible hardware failure. I suppose something could be loose, but I think she’s on borrowed time already.

Again, I’m not sure I want to spend the money on a secondary computer. I really did like my aunt’s teeny little dell laptop this Christmas (seriously, I don’t think it was as big as my purse), it was so lightweight and cute! Then there’s the whole everything PC comes with Vista now, and do I really want to deal with that hassle? Maybe I should just work on Minnie and handwrite at the write-ins (shudder!). Sure, I’ve got my Olympus, but I think the noise would bother the other writers. (Not to mention where would I find ribbons?)

Then there’s the work issue. We finally have a VPN set up at work for the accounting system but it’s not Mac-compatible. So if I ever need to work from home I’ll need another laptop. No, I don’t think asking work to buy me a laptop is a viable solution either, as the frequency of me doing work from home is probably on the low side. But work isn’t the only compatibility issue: not all sites play nicely with Mac/Safari or even Firefox and you can’t get an IE installation for Mac anymore.

I just so didn’t need to have to worry about this this month! Argh!