Silver Linings

Today's Mood: poorer (not sure that's technically a mood--but it sure is how I feel at the moment!) Today's Music: Sarah Mclachlan. Today's Writing: query letters. Today's Quote:

Back-up your work. Now. And often! -Sarah McElrath

*******

Saturday my computer died. Crashed and burned. No kidding. It was working fine the day before. I plugged it in Saturday morning, planning on running a back-up and then printing my manuscript to get it out in the mail again, and what do you know, it didn't seem to want to start up. Weird black lines fizzled across the screen, the apple appeared, but nothing else did.

In my limited computer knowledge, I deduced my power supply wasn't working correctly--the icon on the top of the screen kept flicking between battery and power supply. After much inept finagling and a trip to the Mac store, I got it working. I made a back-up.

Then, while I was on the phone explaining the problem to a tech. guy, I made the mistake of plugging in the power supply again. Bad idea. Screen went black and would recover no more.

At the Mac store, I asked for my options. "You won't like them," the guy told me. He was right. Not possible to repair--or at least, not financially worthwhile to repair--so it was either buy new or buy used.

Long and short of the story was, even though I was crying over the money I didn't plan on spending, at least I didn't lose anything. No photos, no writing, no email addresses....

I had just bought an external hard-drive this summer. Usually I run back-ups of my entire system every two weeks, but due to Khardomah, I had put it off. If it hadn't recovered for that short period of time, I would have lost a month's worth of writing.

So make a back up folks, cause you never know. Turns out that Apple no longer makes those particular power supplies--they've had trouble with them. Imagine that. Now they offer a third-party power supply. Needless to say, I bought one for this laptop.