my 8-month old iBook is experiencing some severe technical difficulties. It’s a trip to the Apple Store for me. Thank God the saleslady persuaded me to get the extended warranty, even though I’m not near the 1-year warranty that Apple offers.
(I’ll take this opportunity to let you PC users laugh at me. But you shouldn’t, usually.)
Yesterday I had the laptop at work and used it fine, and put it to sleep before the long trek to the October Writer’s Meetup. My car was having its state safety inspection, so no car for Jen. So I took the very good WU shuttle system. Unfortunately, it took an extra long time to get from the med school (work) to the hilltop (shuttle bus nexus, where the shuttle to Borders leaves from) because, God bless him, we had a man in a wheelchair get on at about the middle of the line. It took about 10 minutes each to get him on the bus and off, which made us late for the hilltop (we got passed by the other shuttle running the line) therefore I couldn’t catch the shuttle to Borders. Which I might have missed anyway, because when another one came (on time, but a half-hour later than I needed it) the bus driver zoomed off as soon as the last person sat down and didn’t wait for anyone else. Usually they wait a minute or two…
Anyway, the point of that little digression was to note that it was a little chilly while waiting for the Borders shuttle, so maybe that mucked things up, but when I got to Borders and opened the lid to begin writing (well, sort of) it chimed at me like I had turned it off and then started it up again. I almost never shut down the computer, since it’s a Mac and it likes to be stable and not need restarting, so I know I hadn’t done that then. But then the computer just sat there. It was *on* but nothing displayed. So I tried restarting. No go. Then I tried restarting with the power cord, and it worked. Whew.
Alas, when the screensaver came on (since we were talking more than we were writing) it was just white lines on a black background (and no, that is NOT my screensaver), and it wouldn’t go away, so another restart. Various ons and offs later, it seemed to be ok, but after a while of working, the screen just went black, but again, the computer was on. And no burned out backlight like on the old laptop. So I called it a day and tried to turn it off, and of course that didn’t work well either. Boo.

Got it home, tried a few tricks I know about to get it working, and it did, for a while. Then it did the blank screen again, and I couldn’t get it to turn off without unplugging AND removing the battery. Tried to get it to run off a cd to do some diagnostics and it was nothing doing, and the cd is still in the drive to boot (no pun intended). SO I’m going to stop by the Apple Store in the Galleria and hopefully the geniuses there can help me out. This is a bad time for me to lose my laptop, because November is right around the corner and therefore so is NaNo. Sure I can write at work, but my best writings came at about midnight each night last year, and I can’t exactly traipse to work in my pj’s to write that ‘perfect scene’ when it wakes me up in the middle of the night.
So pray for me and my Mac, and the next time you see me, please don’t laugh at my my iBook. It’s on the defensive as it is.