The Ballad of the Broken Laptop

I'm in pain, suffering, a frustaion that claws at the heart of me. My laptop is broken. Not so broken as to be totally unusable, no that would make the way ahead clear. Instead its broken enough that it causes me grief but leads me to hope that it may be fixed simply.

After a week or so of fiddling and rebooting and cursing and screaming I have narrowed it down to some kind of loose/broken/dirty connection betwixt motherboard and hard disk. Basically it occasionally blue screens and subsequently the hard disk is not found by the BIOS. Until that is I give it a little thump and then all is well again. When you resort to thumping your laptop in order to make it work you are in trouble.

I toook it apart and cleaned and prodded and it seems to be a little more stable than it was but its still not right. I have to be very gentle with it and carting it about to take advantage of free WIFI and sunshine would seem to be a flight of fancy.

Still on the bright side I got a nice light and super cheap tripod so I can take non blurry long exposure shots now (like the one here, a full 60 seconds!) so I will hopefully be able to get a bit further in my HDR experiments. I just hope my laptop works enough for me to process them.