I’m writing this on my OLD computer. The new one that we got just before Christmas has some problem or other and won’t boot up all the way. No idea yet what the problem is, which is pretty frustrating because when I dropped the computer off at Fry’s on Friday, the guy said there was a chance it would be done that day. Here it is, Sunday night, and I’m still waiting. I finally went there to ask how things were going since they weren’t returning my calls, and the guy just said it was still waiting. He wouldn’t give me an estimate.

Now, this has me very, very disappointed in Fry’s Electronics service. I have a service contract, and if the repair is likely to take more than 24 hours, they are supposed to offer a loaner computer. Considering that things have gone significantly over that, I think it would have been nice of them to make that offer.

The initial hope had been that it was a bad hard drive problem, which the part of the diagnosis performed while I was there when I dropped it off was becoming more and more unlikely, so the next step would be to try reinstalling the system… which is where the importance of backing up data comes in. Almost everything I have was already on both computers, however, so while I’m wincing thinking of small things that will be lost, like my current to-do list, there really isn’t anything on there I can’t recreate with reasonable ease or that I wasn’t likely to get around to.

But not knowing whether or not things will be lost is driving me utterly up the wall! Giving me the hope that the computer might be fixed in a few hours really wasn’t a good choice on the employee’s part. If I knew that it would take a few days I would be much less anxious about this whole thing, and I really think the guy had to know that there were many machines in line before it that would have to be repaired first.

This is really a pity, because in the past I have liked Fry’s service. My older sister got her computer from them, and when she had a problem it was fixed quite promptly. I should know; I took it in for her.