Jealous, much?

So less than a week after I start using my new upgraded Linux box for lots of stuff, my laptop suddenly decides not to wake up out of sleep, and when you reboot it the light comes on and you can hear some minor activity inside, but you never get the start up chime and the usual special keys to boot in diagnostics mode or single user mode didn’t work. I think it’s jealous because I haven’t been using it as much. Or maybe it’s just under more stress because I’m opening and closing the lid and moving it around instead of leaving it tethered on my desk all the time.

Vicki has been talking for a while about getting a new laptop because her old MacBookPro with only 3Gb of RAM keeps freezing up, especially when she’s doing Second Life, and especially since she “upgraded” to Lion. So we went off to the Apple store, her to get a new MacBookPro, and me to get some help from the Genius Bar.

The Genius poked around, tried a few things I’d already tried and a few things I hadn’t, all to no avail. It wouldn’t stir. So he said “well, it looks like it needs a new logic board. We had a few problems with nVidia chipsets back around that time, so I’m going to write it up as one of those even though I can’t boot it far enough to run the graphics system diagnostic.” The upshot is that I’m going to be without my laptop for a week or more, and I’m going to get a new $500 logic board for free. Not too bad, I guess. Although if they’d tried to charge me for it, I probably would have just bought a Macbook Air instead. So maybe that’s a mixed blessing.