What a week I'm having! Part One

I guess my problem started in 2007, when I decided to purchase a new laptop to use for school. From Newegg (which is a very reputable website that we frequently purchase from) I got an Acer Aspire 5100-3577 laptop. It had a 2 GHz AMD Turion 64 processer, a 15.4” wide screen, 512MB DDR2 of memory, a 120GB hard drive, an ATI Radeon Xpress 1100 IGP chipset, Windows Vista, built-in WAN, 3 USB ports, microphone, speakers, a card reader, etc. It also had a one year limited manufacturer warranty on parts and labor. A few months later, I bought more memory to support Windows Vista and a cheapo laptop cooler.

Everything was fine. Until one year and a few weeks later….

I had taken my laptop to work one day and was doing my usual thing of either school work or family history research at lunch. I shut it down as I normally do, and when I got home and started it up again, it wouldn’t boot. I relayed this information to my techie boyfriend, who said as nicely as he possible could, that my laptop “Died.” In the words of Charlie Brown…."ARGH!"

He salvaged what information he could and I called Acer to see if they could fix it. I was informed that the motherboard was the problem and that it would take $400 to fix it. That was half the cost of the laptop itself! Uh, no thanks. We looked on Ebay for a few days and followed a few good bids. We finally found another Acer Aspire 5100, but this model was a 5674; so it had a video camera. UPGRADE! I bought it with the intentions that if something should break on it, we could just use the older laptop and everything would work fine.

Until one year and six months later….

I was using my laptop as I normally do and went to shut it down before going to bed. I didn’t use it all day yesterday until I went to boot it up last night. Dead. I asked Matt to look at it. Dead. He couldn’t even salvage the hard drive, so hopefully it is just the hard drive this time and not the motherboard. On the good side, if he can’t get it to work, I’ll have target practice!