The laptop crashes. Not like last time—a blown hard drive and everything a loss— this time, the screen is failing. It appears that a grove of trees is silhouetting themselves along the bottom of the screen so that I can’t see the taskbar when it pops up or the execute button on, say, the graphic upload screen in the post editor for this site. And one of those trees is growing it’s way towards the center of the screen, up perhaps two and a half inches. Significant space on a screen that’s only nine inches tall despite it’s fifteen inch diagonal measure.

I called Best Buy with little hope. I have a service contract with them, but I’m pretty sure it precludes screen maintenance. The fellow I talked with said screen replacements run about three-fourths of the initial cost, so, if this one ran a thousand, the screen is going to run seven-hundred fifty dollars. Not a good sign. His advice was accept reality and go buy a new one. Of course, that’s coming from someone who’s living depends on selling new computers. We’ll see. First, it goes to the shop and we’ll let them tell us we’re out of luck to our face. Huh.