We Interrupt This Story....

Yesterday my laptop crashed.

It's 3 years old, and has been acting up a little - trouble booting up, takes a couple of starts before it goes all the way some days.

Before I went to Hong Kong I did a (hopefully) complete back up of files just in case. Yesterday, I get to Starbucks, do some brain work to prepare myself to write the scene... really get into it to the point that ideas are bouncing around my head like popcorn in Jiffy Pop foil. Pull out the laptop and...

It starts up right away. No problems today!

Then... it freezes up about 5 minutes into my work. Maybe 10 minutes. Enough time to really get going.

So, I try a litte of everything, and nothing works. Can't even shut it down. It's frozen. I de-power it, try to start it again... and get a message: it ain't gonna start again. I can't even start it up in Safe Mode. Won't work.

Now, I could take it to a repair place and wait... but I have scenes to write and a tip to put up. Plus, last time I took this very laptop in for a repair, they wiped the hard drive - and I lost everyrthing. This was to repair a broken plastic hinge. Oh, and I didn't have the laptop for about 6 months because the repair place also lost it. That was a nightmare.

Now, here's the thing: Sunday I was actually going to by a new laptop... but they were all out of the HP I was looking at. Everyone was. I spent the whole ay looking for a laptop and came home with nothing. Not a big deal, because there was no rush to buy one - I could wait until they had the one I wanted in stock (Maybe Thursday according to the guy at Best Buy).

Now I couldn't wait that long. I needed one *today*.

So I closed up the dead laptop and zoomed all over town until I found, not what I was looking for... but the closest thing to it. You know, probably just like you - my computer is my whole life. Everything important I have is on it. I spend more time with my computer than I spend with my friends and family. I can't live without it.

Now, I have a desk top that still runs Win98 and I hardly ever use. It's, like, 2 gigs total. Bought ot when that was an amazing amount of space. Since then, I've just been buying new laptops and hardly ever working on the desktop. The final death knell for the desktop was when I pulled the plug on Compuserve and now have no dial up or DSL... I'm all wifi, baby! The desktop has all kinds of expensive to replace programs that may not make it to XP... so they just sit on that machine. I *could* have used the desktop to work on the script - but who wants to be trapped at home on warm, beautiful LA days?

Anyway, the new laptop has Vista, and when I slap in my MMScreenplay disk and load it... it doesn't run. I get a message on the new computer that the progam needs to be "elevated". So, I hold up the laptop a bit above table level and try again... still doesn't work. How elevated does this need to be? Should I get in an elevator? So I ended last night by putting up a scipt tip... but afraid that I wouldn't be able to work on my script even after spending a thousand or so on a new laptop. Swell!

Okay - this morning I go to the MMS website where they have a link to "what to do if you have Vista"... and the danged thing works perfect now. Relieved - I can sleep... didn't do enough of that last night. But it's 9am, so instead I'm going to get some work done.

I can't wait to see what other programs don't work on Vista... haven't tried to install my printer drivers, yet.

- Bill