Laptop Horror Stories

[greywolff]

in honor of laptops everywhere

 

with the number of laptop owners in the world im sure there are lots of stories such as BOXTURTS

 

mine is below

 

my 3 yr old daughter loves to color one day i left my laptop at home and running with the lid up. she had aparantly decinded the screen made a neat coloring book. now getting kids to close anything can be a cahlange as a parent but with her its been easy untill one drawback. she closed the lid with the crayon still inside this cracking the display and melting crayon all over the inside. but alas it does still work at least.

[TCH-Tim]

I haven't totally destroyed mine yet, but I'm trying:

 

- spilled Guinness on the keyboard (thankfully not the whole pint, what a waste of Guinness). Recovered, but very tough to clean.

- cat spilled water when I wasn't around and the laptop was on. Internal wireless card hasn't worked since.

- got a PCMCIA wireless card and upon inserting it promptly bent one of the pins deep inside the slot so it touches another pin. Now anytime I insert a card in the slot the laptop reboots.

- a pretty solid static electricity shock has rendered the touchpad useless.

- dropped it once, but no apparent damage from that.

 

Two years and my Dell is still purring.

[owatagal]

I didn't do a thing; I just bought a nightmare laptop (which has since been replaced, for obvious reasons):

 

I bought a laptop in 2000, planning to take it to England for the year. Two months later, the battery failed. Two months after that, we determined it wasn't the battery, it was something in the laptop itself. I didn't have time to fix it before moving overseas, so I resigned myself to having a "laptop" that had to be plugged in 24/7.

 

Six months later the sound card died. Kaplut. So much for music; I wasn't about to pay to fix it, and the company was now refusing to fix even the battery. [Don't ask... suffice it to say I hate that company with the fire of a thousand suns and other cliches.]

 

Six months after THAT the screen blew. Well, I do have one little pixel that changes color, but you can't exactly view the screen based on one pixel's color. The company denied all responsibility (naturally). We are no longer on speaking terms.

 

A year after that, the internal modem died and I had to get an external modem. [ironic aside, I was using AOL at the time and didn't realize my modem was dying. They sent me a free external modem when I tried to cancel service with them, which worked, so I stayed with AOL until I went to cable modem. That's right. AOL was more helpful fixing my computer than the company that made it. I couldn't make that up if I tried.]

 

So.

 

My lap top must be plugged in 24/7.

It has no sound.

It must be hooked up to an external monitor.

It also must be hooked up to an external modem.

For my own comfort, I also hooked it up to an ergodynamic keyboard and laser-light mouse.

 

Don't you think I would have been better off if I'd just bought a desktop?