I think my laptop may have passed on to the great computer junkyard in the sky. If indeed it comes back, it's certainly well on its way to laptop-death.

It started showing signs of sadness a while before Christmas, when it blue-screened me two nights in a row. So I ran virus scan (negative), cleaned off spyware, ran chkdsk and defragged the hard drive. It was happy again.

And then soon after Christmas it started lagging when I loaded a new program. I don't have much running when I'm using it: Firefox, MSWord, iTunes, MSN Messenger, occasionally Excel, plus the virus protection (AVG). That's not really lagging material. I uninstalled something I had recently installed (a desktop calendar) but that made no difference. (It's also only a two-year-old laptop, and I was expecting a longer life; the previous one lasted three years, and I spilt a pint of juice on that one!)

The lagging started to get really annoying. So last Saturday I ran chkdsk again.

It took a mere 14 hours. >.o

And my laptop still lagged. Then it blue-screened me yesterday when I opened MSWord and did so again today when I did nothing, and now refuses to boot.

I'm hoping it will boot tomorrow, that today I tried too soon after it crashed.

I'm surprisingly calm about this. I suppose because it's been going on for a little while, I've resigned myself to the fact that it's on its way out. I backed up my fiction, obviously. All I will have lost is some edits to a short story, but some of those are written on the print-out, and the draft was pretty clean so it won't be too difficult to redo if necessary.

My music is another matter. 25GB of it. There's a fair bit of that I don't listen to any more, but there's a fair bit I do. If my laptop turns back on, I'm getting an external hard-drive this weekend and backing it up. If not, well, guess I'm going to have to ask some friends very nicely for music I've lost.

Also this weekend: buying a replacement laptop, it seems. I'm going to give Mac a try with a Macbook.

Well, at least I got paid today? That's good, right? And I have savings that I can draw on. I suppose it's better to have to do this while I'm still living at home and my disposable income is greater. Still, splashing out £800-£900 isn't the most fun prospect.

Oh well. Shit happens.