Last night, as is usual I was on the laptop chatting idly with people between rounds. It came to be time for my last round, and I moved to type a 'gotta go!' message. When I started typing, there was a 'zap!' sensation of a spark, and the laptop just froze, the screen image slowly degrading. This HAS happened before. Usually, just shutting it off and taking the battery out for a while gets things okay again- I dunno why, though I suspect it has something to do with the charge draining away.

Anyway, I tried this and... Nada. Nothing. I fiddled as much as I dared, then packed it up (battery taken out) with the sinking feeling that I'd just fried my expensive toy.

However, I tried starting it again, and it worked! I am DEFINITELY going to get everything backed up tonight!

I'm also rethinking my priorities in laptops. I mostly need it for internet and writing, and I want a keyboard no smaller than what I have now... It would be NICE if it could handle CoH, but... I don't need it to. So if and when this thing fails I'm prolly looking at something a lot cheaper than what I was earlier drooling over.

Hopefully, this won't be soon. But given that the keyboard is going out, one of the USB ports has a bad connection, as does the power cord socket, I may have to consider it sooner than later.