I guess I was expecting this to happen, at some point. Last night, my beloved little laptop computer (a Sony Vaio) decided it was done. It's display gave up the ghost – I've seen LCD screens die like this before – something about a just-not-quite-right impact, or too much extreme of temperature (heat, in this case, sitting baking in the heat of my truck cab), and suddenly there erupts an orthogonal rainbow of colors, while the background washes out. If you bonk it around a bit, squeeze where you know the contacts are inside the plastic case of the lid of the laptop, you can get the colors to come back and make out what's on the screen, but the rainbow remains, and each reboot brings in a few more streaks of color, widening from a mere inch to nearly 50% of the screen in the last 5 reboots.
I've managed to rescue my data, my website development files, pictures, email, but I don't think I'll be getting in there again. I'm confident not to lose anything, as I'll extract the harddrive and slave it to my desktop when I get back to Minneapolis, but meanwhile, I'll be computerless for at least a short while – though I hadn't been planning on taking the thing to Mexico anyhow, and I leave for thereparts tomorrow morning.
It was a good run – by far the most pleasing laptop I've ever owned: amazing battery life, compact and lightweight (under 4lbs) and with enough processor power and memory to run my database applications slowly but reliably. I've definitely recommended Sony Vaio to many people because of the experience over the last several years.
So. I'd actually been toying with the idea of buying a new machine before taking off for Korea next month, but this, obviously, decides it. The real question is whether, given my strong concerns about Windows Vista (which is the only Microsoft OS being offered now on PCs), do I make the transition to Apple? I've been on-and-off considering it, but, given I just ported my entire website apparatus to a Microsoft-only platform (ASP.NET 2.0), I'm not sure I want to face re-migrating the thing to something I can maintain on a Mac. Of course, there's the dual OS option, but there's a learning curve there, too, running some old copy of XP on a Mac – plus, I've heard about performance issues with Windows-on-Mac, even under dual boot (as opposed to virtual machine).
So… we shall see. I have the next week, in Mexico City, to think about it, and meanwhile, I'll stay "connected" via internet cafes and borrowed computers – I'm writing this from my father's computer here in the hills of L.A.