Well, isn’t that Special?

Yeah, that was a pretty misleading title for those of you who’ve followed my series of “Special Reader” posts. Because this post is not about my very Special Reader who I know has been wondering why on earth she’s not seen a post from me in so long! Did I stop blogging, become incapacitated or maybe even kick the bucket? No, I’m still around!  So onto the topic of this post….

A few months ago, after over a year of chugging along quite pathetically, my laptop died. Completely dead, wouldn’t turn on, dead as a doornail. I feared some of my documents that hadn’t recently been backed up were gone. The hubby decided to enlist the help of a computer nerd friend who was able to retrieve the data off the fried hard drive and transfer it to an external hard drive, so at least I still had all my files.

Then I began using a borrowed, teeny tiny little toy-like computer. I’m pretty sure it was made by Fisher Price. For one thing it was super slow, apparently due to the fact that it was only a single something or other instead of a dual something or other. The keyboard was so small it was not conducive to typing at all. The screen was so small that in order to see anything on the Internet I’d had to do some little mouse over hover maneuver to get to the bar and scroll, essentially only seeing part of the image at one time. That is when I was actually successful at the awkward mouse over maneuver which was quite a trick; sometimes the elusive scroll bar would appear, sometimes it wouldn’t and even when it did, you had to be fast and hit it just right. Those were some fun times. But again, it was pretty much a toy.

So back to my laptop. The hubby decided that since his friend told him the hard drive was dead that he’d just buy a new hard drive, install it and resurrect my poor old laptop. It was a  good idea in theory, but  completely ignored the fact that the other persistent problems I’ve been having with this thing for years had nothing to do with the hard drive. I have some special issue with my keyboard that causes my text to suddenly just shoot up and over a couple lines. So writing is ridiculous. In addition, since my computer has been brought back from the dead it’s developed a couple new, extra-special features. Email will suddenly shut down with no notice. And now the Internet, no matter what browser I use, will decide to seize up and stop working right in the middle of something. So now my computer is “alive” and I can use it as long as I don’t have to email, look at the Internet or type anything.