Just a note that my brand spanking new, gorgeous laptop that was donated by Jason is now dead. The water incident from this week hosed the hard drive to the point of complete data loss, fried the power supply and likely toasted the motherboard.
Estimated repair cost: 1000$.
Estimated data recover cost: 600$.
Estimated cost of clothing replacement due to profound weeping: 100$.
All in all, it means the laptop is effectively worthless to me, I think. Anyone want to buy it? It’s a great laptop. Just needs some TLC. I’ll get an official quote later next week on the repairs. Y’never know, it might just be the powersupply and the HDD.
Drop me a line if you’re interested in refurbishing this beast. Otherwise I’ll likely eBay it sometime in June. And then I’m computer-less. I have no idea how I’m going to work at this point, but something’ll work out. It always does.
I’m actually remarkably unstressed about all of this. I still don’t know what it all means, or how I’ll get any work done in the long term, but then I’ve been through worse in the last year and still landed on my feet. I’m open to ideas though. Always open to ideas 
April 29th, 2005 at 2:00 pm
Ouch. You have my sympathies. For everyone who clucks their tongue and says “you should back up everything every night!” there are a bunch of us who know it wouldn’t take much to cause us similar grief. I’d be okay if one hard drive fried on my machine, but if the whole computer went up in smoke (or water), I’d be scrambling to find partial back-ups from two or three months ago. I’ve started dumping documents and e-mails to my Gmail account just in case, but I would still lose a lot of stuff. This weekend, I’ll do a Jeremy Wright CD burn of my hard drive in memory of your laptop.
April 29th, 2005 at 4:37 pm
Hey, I might be interested, can you let me know when you have the quote for repairs?
April 29th, 2005 at 5:11 pm
That really sucks. Can’t you just go ask for someone to sponsor you a new one though?
April 29th, 2005 at 5:57 pm
Were you going to try that DriveSavers that someone here mentioned or not worth it?
April 29th, 2005 at 8:19 pm
Totally sorry that happened to you. I have lots of desktop carcasses around here, but nothing that could be pressed into service as a proper computer for you.
I’ll keep my eye open for laptops, we have a few depots around town here that deal in that type of stuff.
April 30th, 2005 at 9:07 am
Oh that so sucks. I really do feel your pain.
I wish I were in the position to donate a new laptop to you, but I am going to struggle to replace my own as it is. If I win the lottery, though, I’ll pop over and we can go shopping.
April 30th, 2005 at 9:18 am
Help for a friend
My good friend Jeremy lost his laptop this week, after his two year old son poured water in it because it ‘looked thirsty’. With it goes his HDD and all the data on it, including the latest chapters of the book he’s been writing. Like me, Jeremy is …
April 30th, 2005 at 11:30 am
I friend of mine used to work for IBM tech support, and he said a guy called in once with this to say:
“I left my laptop in the car overnight, and when I got it in the morning it was frozen shut. So, I put it in a big ziplock back, and then immersed it in warm water. When I came back a few minutes later, it had sunk to the bottom. Now it doesn’t work. Would that be covered by the warranty?”
Sorry to hear that J man. When I worked at Futureshop we had a coffeed laptop come in, and we had to clean the sugar crystals off EVERY major electronic connection in the system. It did work in the end though.
And I suppose you could pull your PC out of storage, right?
April 30th, 2005 at 11:34 am
Too bad it wasn’t a neighbour’s kid. I haven’t check insurance policies lately, but there used to be fairly common condition in homeowners and tenants’ policies covering damage caused by their kids or their pets. Our dog ate somebody futon once (don’t ask) and our policy covered the replacement. I suspect policies have become less forgiving in recent years…
April 30th, 2005 at 1:28 pm
What happened to your futon? My Dog ate it.
lol. Funny.