I’ve been away from my blog because when I returned from the Irish Dance championships, I came home to my trusty Dell Inspiron 8200, dead as a doornail. Panicked, I shut it down, unplugged everything, and rebooted. Everything worked just as it always did — I could hear the fan and the hard drive and the little musical WindowsXP boot ditty, but nothing was on the display. Just a blank, dark hole.

I plugged in the external flat panel and rebooted — behold! A screen — exactly half of an extended desktop, with the start bar and just about everything else on the dead screen. After some intensive troubleshooting it was apparent that it wasn’t just a rogue driver — the backlight on the screen had died. I could make out vague shapes on the Dell screen by shining a Maglight directly on it, but it was a real challenge to get the dialog boxes dragged over to the second display, and I couldn’t get the Function Keys to just turn off the desktop extension and make the external display the sole display, try as I might.

As much as I didn’t want to admit it, I had a laptop that was half of its former self. Screen backlights are not cheap to fix and I was three days out of a three-year service contract. (Planned obsolescence?) Most important, there’s no way I could be without my primary machine for the time it would take to repair it. Plus…I loved my Dell. I loved how the keyboard felt, was laid out, how the display looked, the wonderful high resolution, the snappy performance — everything. When the hard drive began to feel a bit crowded, I added an external to store my photos and documents. When I started working on site designs, I added the external monitor so I could view the site in a couple of browsers at once. I thought my Dell and I would be partners for a very long time yet.

There was NO WAY I was even considering replacing it, and certainly not the day after Thanksgiving with a month to go till Christmas. But that was exactly what I did.

I ended up with a Toshiba M65 and a RAM upgrade to 1.5 GB. How I arrived at this choice is a topic for a separate post, but I will say that the price and feature set were right — really right.

So far, the only thing I’m not thrilled with is the keyboard. It’s clicky and has an ITTY-BITTY shift key on the right (half the size of a normal one), so that when I hit “shift”, I usually end up hitting the “Up” arrow right next to it instead, which really, really annoys me. I am making a conscious effort to make myself get used to that key, but if it keeps being a pain I may end up with any right-handed upper-case letters being lower-case just because I’m sick of hitting the wrong darn key.

It came with a free Epson printer and a decent rebate, too. The printer is an all-in-one, with slots for Compact Flash and SD cards. The computer, on the other hand, has slots for memory stick and xD cards — formats I don’t currently use. Fortunately the slots on the printer match the format for my NikonD70, so offloading and printing photos is a real breeze now.

After 2 days of transferring files, reinstalling programs and tweaking settings, I’m back in the saddle and catching up.

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