The husband's laptop just bought the farm.
Sigh.
It just crapped out. He's taken it apart and was unable to find the
problem. He just announced that either the chip has crapped out or the
entire hard drive has done the same. He doesn't know. The thing won't
boot up at all, hence there's no way to check. Fortunately, thanks to
office networking, everything was saved to the desktop and no
information was lost at all. While he has his desktop (Gandalf), he had
the laptop for giving presentations and for checking message boards
while he was playing his games. This, in case you didn't know about the
husband's problem with his clients paying him (grrrr), is yet another
computer that he kept because people chose not to pay him. This one was
actually from the web development company that fired him via email,
then refused to cough up his final paycheck. We paid for it by means
other than slapping down the Visa, but essentially, it's no skin off
our collective nose that it crapped out. But that doesn't mean much
when you're married to a techie. While the laptop's not really a
necessity, it, however, is a given that he's not going to see it this
way and that he'll start whining...soon.
When he begged and pleaded for permission to spend loads of currency on
Gandalf, I demanded one concession in return: that he wasn't to bitch
about speed, memory or anything of the sort for two whole years. My
grace period ends in January. I was relishing the thought of enjoying
the remaining few months of enforced silence. Now, everything's
different. He won't bitch about Gandalf until January, but he will
bitch about the loss of the laptop starting now. We'll see how this
shakes out.