Windchaser

Dear LJ:

What have you done to my reading page?!

It used to be set up with colours associated with people or communities (Nanowrimo was orange, "Little Details" was green, craft things were olive, etc), so I could easily scroll my way to a particular post.

Now, it's 90% illegible. Things are white on a mostly-white background, or dark grey on a black background. What's going on? :|

*hopes it's related to that winged-pumpkins banner, and it'll "repair itself" once Halloween is over*

My icon is wrong. It should be red and say "stop".

OK, so before Christmas, you may remember I had issues with my PB desktop? As in, it would turn on, it'd be fine for a while (read: 5-10 minutes), then it'd just... hang. I hoofed it all the way across town to PC World with it, they repaired it, and then I had to lug it all the way back, requiring about 12 bus journeys in total to do (4 to get it there, 4 to pick up my data, 4 to get the machine at the end)? (And it might still not be 100% "fixed" either, because it's just started doing the exact same thing I took it in for again.)

Well, in November, when I took my PC in, I bought a new laptop! A shiny, beautiful little Compaq, with a widescreen and 500gig of memory. It worked and it was lovely. :)

...until Monday. I was on-call. I had the laptop turned on, so I could access the stock list and see if I had to go in to get a particular stock item, and got a phonecall at... 11:45pm, I think it was, maybe a little earlier. Anyway, I had to go in. It took me a grand total of about an hour, hour and a half to get in, get the item, take it to the ward, and get back.

When I got back... the laptop wouldn't come out of "sleep". Screensaver had come on just before I left, no big deal, and it had turned off by the time I got home - power light was on, the little "wireless" light was on (albeit orange, not white like usual) and the caps lock light was slowly blinking on... and off... and on... and off...

I touched the touchpad to wake it up, and... nothing happened. I turned it off, and back on. Nothing happened. I let its battery run all the way down and then tried to turn it on... nothing happened.

Hmm. OK. ¬_¬

Googling it, I find THIS.

More specifically, this:
"It does look like a hardware failure of some component on the Motherboard. By far your best option is to contact HP and arrange to have the notebook repaired under warranty."

Greeeeat. Just what I want, another trip to PC World.

I have had this machine for... less than 3 months. I bought it on the 21st November 2011, and on the 6th February 2012, it dies. Seems like it might be the model isn't too reliable, either. I HAVE A SAD FACE. SEE MY SAD FACE.

Never again will I call my poor dear little EeePC a "craptop". It's slow, and it runs Linux which makes it a pig to update, but it's a little workhorse. It just... keeps going and going and going. Like the Dell I had before, that was an awesome beast - slow, maybe, with a hard-disk rather on the small size (only 100-ishGb I think?), but man, it just kept on going. :(

Is it too much to ask for a machine that just... works?