Fuck. Fuck. Fuck

My laptop's screen has died. Rather than showing anything useful, it is showing a screen full of vertical lines of various colours. Thus I am unable to use my laptop right now. My old laptop has a perfectly good screen, but will only boot if the temperature / humidity / day of the week / phase of the moon / gravitational status of the universe is right, so it is highly questionable whether I will be able to use it. This means that I am rather lacking in computer resources right now, and blogging (and indeed almost everything else - we are far too dependent on our computers these days) will be highly variable until it is fixed.

As it is the weekend, Dell's telephone helpline is not operational. The recorded voice suggested that I send them an e-mail instead. Upon going to an internet cafe to send such an e-mail, their electronic support system insisted that I enter my "service code" - a set of letters and numbers attached to the bottom of the computer - before I would be allowed to send such an e-mail. I have the invoice for the purchase of the computer, which gives my customer number, my order number and my invoice number, but none of these are the number that Dell wants now.

I really could have done without this right now.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Update: At least I am in good company. Laptops are wonderful things, but they can be finicky and temperamental. Desktops are more reliable. I actually have a motherboard in my possession with a CPU and 512Mb of RAM on it. I just need a screen, keyboard, case, power supply and hard drive (plus an operating system - do I want a Linux box?) to have a desktop machine. I must either buy or wrangle these parts so I have some backup. Actually if I even had a screen right now things would be better. My laptop has VGA out. (This is assuming I don't have to switch the external monitor output on while looking at the primary screen, in which case I remain completely screwed).

Can I add a "bugger" to the "fuck" I said already?

Further Update: My old laptop is alive. It's a bit slow, but I can at least get stuff done. Apologies for all the profanities, too.

Even further Update: No, actually my old laptop isn't alive. As I said, it is highly temperamental. I may get it to work at times over the next few days and I may not. Using a public terminal in a library right now.