Four Island

Even if you know me, you might not know that I am not good around glasses of water. Seriously. If there is a glass of water around, I am very likely to accidentally spill it. Lol, really. I've spilled water on books, homework, precious memories and expensive electronic equipment. And this is a problem because I'm almost over-hydrated, I drink way too much water.

So, it was just a matter of time before I did something with a glass of water that I would really regret. Sunday, November 8th, 2009. 11pm. I was in bed, with a glass of water on my bedside table. I got up to go to the bathroom, and as I did, my hand spazzed and I spilled my glass of water all over my laptop computer.

Yes, you read that correctly. Go back and read it again if you're not sure. I spilled a glass of water on my computer. I immediately pulled the battery out and dried it off with paper towels, but, being the impatient idiot I am, decided to try to turn it back on after only 7 minutes instead of the generally accepted 72 hours. It actually turned on.... for about 30 seconds, after which it would not turn on at all. The power button did nothing at all and even inserting the AC adapter wouldn't light the charging light at the front of the computer. So basically, I killed it. What's worse is that I got that computer on November 9th, 2008. Yes, you read that correctly too, I killed my computer an hour before it's first birthday. Oh, irony, it just keeps coming back.

So, after switching between freaking out and lying on the floor doing nothing for three days, we finally brought it into Geek Squad at Best Buy. We waited for an hour and a half on that line, and even tried turning the computer on while in the line, but it didn't work. When it was our turn, I placed the laptop on the desk and, seriously, the guy put his finger on the power button, pressed it, and the computer turned on. ???? I know, very weird.

I was ecstatic that the computer was working as I was expecting that it would have to be sent off to someplace for weeks and that I would have to survive without a computer. But, the enthusiasm didn't last. My precious fourie was spazzing a bit. Most of the keys on the keyboard didn't work, but luckily, the arrow keys did so I was able to boot into Linux. However, one of the keys must've been stuck because the username prompt kept filling up with "u"s and it was nearly unusable. The tech person told us that the computer would continue to get worse until it completely died, and advised me to buy an external hard drive to back up my data to. I ended up getting a 500 GB Seagate drive (which was really exciting because I'd never had an eHDD before) and left feeling very happy because my computer was at least working.

It didn't last. When I got home and tried to back up my data, I was having a ton of trouble with the eHDD. Eventually, I decided it was corrupted and was annoyed that I couldn't use it. Instead, I returned it and bought a flash drive (the exact same flash drive I use to backup trindla) and now use mondoarchive to backup my laptop nightly.

My laptop has been getting better, though. The spazzing keyboard has stopped, and even though I have to use a USB keyboard now (which is very annoying), the computer doesn't have any other visible problems. I even ran an extensive (it took 30 minutes) test on my hard drive and it came up as completely healthy. So, here I am, typing up this post on my precious little laptop. It's just so resilient :P

The moral of this story is, if your hand spazzes when it gets too close to a glass of water, don't put a glass of water next to books, homework, precious memories or expensive electronic equipment. :P

EDIT: Lol, I keep saying that I killed my computer an hour before it turned 1 year old, but I actually just found that November 9th has nothing to do with my laptop. November 9th 2008 was the day Four Island went back up from it's extended downtime. OCTOBER 9th was the day I went laptop-searching and found this computer, but October 12th was the day I got it. :P