So on Saturday I found that when I unplugged my computer, it would die completely–either right away or after a short delay. Obviously not an ideal situation for a laptop. However, eventually I took out and replaced the battery, and that seemed to solve the problem.
This morning when I put my compy to sleep and unplugged it to bring it to school, apparently the same thing happened. My computer turned off and wouldn’t turn on again. I didn’t think too much of it–I’d fixed it easily the last time, right?
I took the battery out, then put it back in. Still wouldn’t turn on. I moved to a seat near an outlet and plugged the computer in. Still wouldn’t turn on.
Oh crap.
Zachary is comatose.
This is a problem.
I use my laptop to take notes in class–I don’t have any dead tree notebooks. Not to mention all my art, pictures, music, writing…basically my whole life is on my computer. If I can’t make him boot even as a hard drive…that is bad.
I’m writing on a DIS laptop right now. They’re slow and they only run Windows. They don’t have AIM (Nelson, what’s the web-based AIM client you found again?), they don’t have an FTP client or any respectable photo software, and while they have Skype they don’t have Gizmo.
This is seriously not cool. Don’t ask me how I’m going to write two papers, two paper proposals, and EU interview questions this week when the nearest computer has a funky-ass Danish keyboard and is a three hours round-trip away. Don’t ask how I’ll post Copenhagen photos or update Nosve Release. Don’t ask how I’m gonna stay in communication with my friggin’ boyfriend six time zones away. Hell if I know.
…What am I gonna do??
Are you not allowed to take the laptop home? Is there no IT department that will lend you a laptop?
The web-based IM client I found is Meebo.com, which is great because it supports both AIM and Jabber (e.g. Gtalk, LJ Talk). I recommend it.
As for the computers only running Windows, if you can find a CD burner and burn yourself a copy of Ubuntu’s live CD or Knoppix, it should be trivial to make a DIS laptop run Linux ;-) These distributions can run entirely from CD without installing anything on your hard drive, so the DIS people won’t get angry with you for tampering with their laptop… once you take the CD out, everything will be back to normal. Either should ship with Gaim (like Adium except uglier), the GIMP, and FTP clients, and photo-managing software, although I didn’t have a digital camera last time I used Linux so I don’t have experience managing photos on Linux.
If you do get a laptop that you can take home, those laptops are always re-imaged when you return them anyway to protect your privacy from future users etc., so you could just install Ubuntu on it ^_^
Also, I would have replaced your laptop when its CD/DVD drive started fritzing, but I understand that it’s easier said than done… Still, storing your life on an unreliable computer with a fried optical drive on is a bad idea, it’s definitely false economy.
Does plugging the computer in without the battery in it help? Also, you could try calling the manufacturer; a roommate of mine had a similar-sounding problem with his ThinkPad and there was some magic key sequence that made the BIOS forget something about the battery, and then all was well.
I don’t know what DIS is, but does it mean you can take the laptop home for a few days while waiting for yours to be fixed? If so, most loaner laptops get re-imaged with Windows when returned, so you could install Ubuntu and get a fully-functioning OS to use while you wait for your normal setup to return.
As for web-based AIM, you can use meebo.com if you want, but note that like all web-based AIM services you tell them your password and there are no technical barriers to stop them from misusing it. (Having said that I use a disposable password for AIM so it doesn’t bother me all that much.)
Hope this helps!