Lenny with The Plastic Hinges

In the weeks leading up to this trip I've had two (count'em, two!) PCs crash-and-burn or go crazily bellyup on me. While I am a person who believes in omens, in cases of supernatural or otherworldly bizarro happenings I defer to 'baseball rules' before throwing in the towel. I won't abandon my dreams to travelogue my trip on this blog until there's a third strike.

In the first instance, my Lenovo with plastic hinges has been suffering some carpal tunnel. It's heavy and gets hot, so I've been considering replacing it for a while now. I've been doing research on what I should replace it with... Perhaps I should have done the research on my work machine. Who knew the Lenovo has transformer-ized into HAL 9000, intent on stopping the evil plot of replacement.

Somehow I picked up a virus or malware that wasn't being wiped by Norton. A popup box would appear indicating that MS wanted to upgrade my Office Suite. It wasn't a very good popup box -- definitely not MS quality, or really even MS style -- I knew it was bogus. And I knew I hadn't purchased an Office upgrade. So I would open Task Manager and kill the task running the box. Safe, on first!

The bug was pretty insistent, and would popup at odd times... like before I had entered my password. So I would have to key gingerly around it, carefully move the box out the way like those guys in Hurt Locker, login in, and kill it with the Task Manager. Boom!

In the interim I'd decided Io voglio (I want) an MS Surface 3, and am tracking prices online. August and September are historically good months for PC purchases due to back-to-school sales, and a Surface 4 is rumored to come out in October. So I'm holding on for dear life to good ole Lenny, waiting for the most bang for my buck. (No, I didn't really give a nickname to a laptop with plastic hinges!)

I saved a search at GoSale and was checking almost every day, ready to pull the trigger.

Apparently this really pissed Lenny off because one day, before I could kill the task, a pseudo MS screen jumped up and started counting out all the files it was loading.... thousands and thousands of files. it took forever... I couldn't interrupt it... then it did a restart (HAL 9000!).... and when it came back up my MS Office had been replaced with some not-quite-right, cant-put-your-finger-on-it, schizophrenic facsimile of Office -- which I knew I couldn't trust. And who knows what else lurked inside that machine.

So I copied my important files onto a thumbdrive, and shut Lenny down forever.

"I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a... fraid." 

Take that, you plastic-hinged behemoth!

Strike one!