A Tale of Two Computers

This weekend was a bust.  Literally.  Here's why:

To start things off wonderfully, my somewhat new laptop decided to crash on me.  My 3 month old laptop.  Seriously.  It unexpectedly came up with a wonderful message stating that the hard drive crashed.

The screen of death.  So naturally, I turn to the good ol' Wide Web to tell me what to do.  How do I do this, you ask?  Why, I marched my butt twenty minutes to use a computer at the Carlson computer lab.  It basically came down to two options: i) use the Windows 7 Ultimate CD to try and run a repair, or ii) use the Startup Repair Utility disc that you can download and burn on to a cd.  Of course the laptop didn't come with a Windows 7 Ultimate CD, so that option was out.  So, I came home, got the the Utility disc, and tried to burn it with my old, ancient laptop that's partially broken.  So why didn't I use said old laptop to research all of this, you ask?  Because the charger for that laptop is shotty, and the back port for a charger on the laptop is somewhat loose/broken.  Basically, you have to hold the charger in a certain position in order for the computer to charge.  Janky?  You bet.  

Back to the story--short version, it didn't work.  Long version, it still didn't work.  It came up with a "cannot repair", and a "either the CD-ROM or the HDD is faulty."  Great.  And it had all of my music, school work, etc. on it.  So I immediately called Fujitsu support to help fix it.  The rep told me to send it in.  He sent me a form for FedEx to fill out, so I could ship the laptop to a facility to be repaired (he also informed me that all my data would be lost.  Great.).  Okay, this I could deal with.  But are things ever that easy?  Nope.  I immediately got a call back from Fujitsu who told me I would be elevated to Level 2, whatever that means.  They'd call me back when they had some higher-up rep on duty.  They didn't call.  So I couldn't send the laptop back throughout the weekend.

Which was fine, I guess, because I had my backup laptop.  Sort of.  Anyway, everything was going decent--the cord wasn't acting up, the laptop was running somewhat smoothly, when out of the blue, it, too, broke.  On Saturday.  Apparently the cord on the charger broke, so no charge was getting through to the laptop.  So, I had no computer the entire weekend.  And I had a group project to take care of.  So what did I end up doing?  Why, playing Mass Effect 2, Dead Space 2, and watching insane amounts of The Office, of course!

Luckily, however, I know how to pick my friends.  Or, better put, I know how to pick friends who are dating computer geniuses.  Carolyn's boyfriend, Eric, luckily came through with a universal battery charger, so now my computer (old one...) is actually running.  I'm counting my blessings he came through--on Sunday night at 9 p.m.  He also tried to save the contents of my HDD on the new computer, but to no avail.  Thank God Microsoft allows you to rip songs off your Zune back onto a computer.  Microsoft = 1, Apple = 0.  

So what of my new computer, you ask?  Well, I ended up calling Fujitsu today in a not-so-great mood.  And they put me on hold for 15 minutes.  No joke.  Some dude in Tennessee ended up telling me that he'd be sending out a new HDD for me to replace.  Seriously?  They place a faulty HDD in the stupid thing, tell me to ship it in for repairs, and now I'm notified half a week later that I'm supposed to replace the HDD?  Are you kidding me, Fujitsu?  Looks like Eric's getting another phone call soon....

So that was my eventful weekend.  No homework, plenty of video games/television/movies, and two broken computers.