- by Owen Morton
The subject of our article today isn’t very interesting, I’ll grant you. It’s more something that I have to get off my chest by writing about, because, quite frankly, the subject infuriates me quite intensely, though it undoubtedly means very little to you. As you will probably be able to deduce from the big yellow title, that which has annoyed me today is my laptop.
I’m actually writing this on 2nd May at about 10.45pm, but as I know full well I’m not going up to campus tonight to put this article up, I’ve dated it 3rd May so I can put it up tomorrow instead. Since my friends are out tonight at the cinema to see X-Men 2 (go with them? Get real), I have very little to do. There is of course the option of doing some work, but at this time of night, that’s unrealistic really. I watched My Family and then Have I Got News For You, both of which were really quite funny tonight, then I decided I’d have a go on Lands of Lore 2, which some of us will recall was the subject of an article nearly two years ago now, but since I can’t remember the .html name under which it’s saved, I can’t add a link to it, and so if you want to read it, you’ll have to go and find it yourselves. I think I wrote it in June 2001. But anyway.
Lands of Lore 2, true classic as it is, is incapable of holding my attention for very long. I’m not sure if this is because I’ve played it several times through already, or whether it’s just because computer games other than FreeCell aren’t very good, but whatever the reason, I played it for about fifteen minutes (I’ve been playing Lands of Lore 2 in fifteen minute instalments rather irregularly for about a year and a half now, and I’m fairly close to finishing now, I think), then, having got bored, I decided to close it down.
And this was where the trouble started. Actually, this is always where the trouble starts, and it’s always the same trouble, but I play the thing so infrequently that I invariably forget what’s going to happen as soon as I try to turn it off. The trouble to which I refer is that, once you have saved your game and clicked ‘Quit’, you will – instead of being returned to the nice Microsoft Windows screen, with its nice picture of Macchu Picchu, as one might reasonably expect would happen – be taken to a big black screen with no distinguishing features other than the mouse, which will be in the centre of the screen. Though the mouse will move (or usually will, unless my laptop is playing its other trick at the same time, which is, with absolutely no provocation, to stop the mouse doing anything), nothing you do in this black screen will be remotely helpful because there’s nothing to click on.
Okay, that’s fair enough. It’s not what you really want, but you can live with it. The sensible thing to do at this juncture is to turn the computer off, because – as I recall – if you do that, and then turn it back on again, everything’s hunky-dory fine. Sadly, me being me, I decide to try and take a shortcut instead and press the button which makes the computer go into standby mode, which would mean I could bypass the ridiculously long time my laptop takes to start up again.
This sounds fine in principle, but what I invariably neglect to remember is that if I do this, the computer will crash. Basically, it accepts the instruction to go into standby, then, on being awoken again, it will give me a nice little message to the effect of “Windows has decided to bugger your machine up, because you did the exact thing last time and you really should learn from your mistakes.” This is the point at which I remember what happened last time, and the time before, and the time before, etc. Obviously, you have no option other than to click on ‘OK’, even though it is most patently not OK, and then the laptop gleefully presents you with a completely buggered up version of itself: you retain control of the mouse, and on this occasion you have the picture of Macchu Picchu (which, in case you were wondering, is my Windows background wallpaper), but you do not have the Start menu or any of the useful little icons such as ‘My Computer’, ‘Recycle Bin’ or ‘Shortcut to FreeCell’, to name a couple of the more commonly resorted to icons on my desktop.
This seems like a slightly more aesthetically pleasing version of the black screen that is the previous part of this process, but in fact, it has one minor, yet completely hideous, difference. This is that, when you try your previous cunning ploy of pressing the standby button and then turning it back on again, you are presented with no change; you still have the Macchu Picchu picture and the mouse, but nothing else. Okay, you think, perhaps it’s time I turn the bloody thing off now, and turn it back on again. But oh, no, it’s too late for that now. If you press the off button, for some reason, it assumes you want to put it into standby, and accordingly does so, and any attempts to revive it will of course have the same effect as mentioned above.
Right, so now you’re completely stuffed. You are presented with a laptop, which you can’t turn off, which has a working mouse with nothing to click on, with a nice background picture. This is all very well if you want your computer to display a nice picture of Macchu Picchu for you for evermore, and never do anything else, but I have found most people have more ambitious plans for their computers. So what the hell do you do with it? Well, normally, it takes me a while to recall that the keyboard is actually still working, and thus the magical combination of ‘Ctrl’, ‘Alt’ and ‘Del’ can be pressed, and from the menu this brings up, it is in fact possible to restart the computer. Problem solved.
Except, of course, for tonight (or last night, since this isn’t going up till tomorrow). Tonight, this eminently simple solution to the problem was denied me. I don’t actually know why, but the keyboard had clearly decided to pack in as well, which is a seriously undesirable circumstance. Since I am cunning enough to not have any backups of all the mindbogglingly useful stuff I have on this laptop – my eight and a half novels are all here in their most up to date forms, and indeed, the eighth and half-finished ninth novel do not exist anywhere else – you can perhaps imagine my panic when I appear to be presented with a thoroughly insoluble dilemma. But fear not. I managed to make the situation yet worse before it was finally amended.
In my crazed attempts to make the bloody thing work, I started pressing all sorts of interesting combinations of keys. I went through the obvious ‘Ctrl’ and ‘Esc’, then ‘Ctrl’ and pretty much every other key on the board, then the same procedure with ‘Shift’ and ‘Alt’, then all three of these and all the other keys. Then I hit upon the key ‘Fn’, which on my laptop’s keyboard nestles comfortably between ‘Ctrl’ and ‘Alt’. It’s a pretty useless key, under most circumstances; as far as I can tell, all it’s useful for is pressing it in combination with ‘F5’ to toggle between the two monitors (I have two – one laptop screen which is frankly useless, and one normal monitor which I can actually see things on). However, I have now developed a healthy respect and fear for the ‘Fn’ key when pressed at the same time as ‘F1’, because this will seemingly turn the computer off. (I was reasoning that at this stage, I couldn’t possibly make the situation worse, but perhaps I should have noticed that the F1 key is marked with a little padlock, which indicates when you press it with ‘Fn’ it will do something akin to locking the computer up.) However, once I’d pressed these two keys, I thought I’d achieved my objective in getting the bloody machine to turn off. All I had to do was press the on button and I’d be back in business, a little pissed off, of course, but not pissed off enough to write a website article about the evening’s experience.
As it happened, of course, it didn’t quite work like that, because if it had, you wouldn’t have had the pleasure of reading this far, if you have read this far, which would frankly surprise me if you have. So if you have, congratulations. I’m nearly finished. When I pressed the on button, I was greeted with absolutely no response. I pressed it several times in something approaching panicked desperation, then resorted to pressing lots of other buttons, even though this tactic was precisely what had got me into this fix in the first place. I then decided to be clever, and press ‘Fn’ and ‘F1’ again, in the hope that this might undo whatever I’d just done and get me back at least to having my mouse and nice little picture of Macchu Picchu, but no. To all intents and purposes, the laptop was now utterly dead.
This was the stage I rather dreaded, the point at which I would have to phone up my dad at 10.30 at night and inform him that somehow I’d managed to bugger up the laptop he’d given me. Understandably, this was not a prospect which particularly appealed to me, so I considered other options, such as taking the thing into town tomorrow and getting it mended by one of the small-time computer businesses, of which there seem to be many in York, especially on Walmgate. This didn’t especially appeal either, largely because it would cost money, and as anyone who knows me will inform you, I am extremely tight. (Indeed, the reason I was in this predicament in the first place was because I wasn’t willing to fork out for a cinema ticket to see X-Men 2, though I think I could probably justify this on the basis of X-Men 2 almost certainly being a crap film, if X-Men 1 was anything to go by.)
The only other option suddenly occurred to me as I was about to pick up the phone. It was a rather desperate idea, but I figured that at this stage, there really was nothing to lose – the computer was dead anyway. I unplugged everything, turned the laptop upside down and attempted to remove the battery. This was harder than might be expected, largely because there were several panels and I was unsure as to which one was the battery. Fortunately, it was the first one I tried. I removed the battery and then put it back in again. I then turned the computer on. And it worked.
The point of all this is that I would really love to inquire why there is a combination of keys that, when pressed, will result in your laptop going so dead that it can only recover by the expedient of removing the battery? It doesn’t seem to be a particularly useful combination of keys (I know for a fact I won’t ever be using it again). Which Microsoft executive decided to programme that into the computer? Is it a legal necessity that every computer must have the ability to completely bugger itself up? On a side note, I should also like to inquire why I have to go through this sequence of events, apart from the ‘Fn’ and ‘F1’ bit, every single bloody time I shut Lands of Lore 2 down? Well? I’m waiting.
Okay, thank you for putting up with me. I’ve got that off my chest now. I’ve recently been discovering that it’s a good idea to talk about my problems, but I suspect I’d have had a hard time finding someone willing to listen to me ranting on about this – even best friends have their limits, you know – so I thought I’d inflict it on anyone reading my website instead.
And one last thing before I go: yesterday (yesterday being 2nd May, i.e. today to me now, but yesterday once this article goes up) was the anniversary of my first game of FreeCell ever! I know this because, for some reason, I mentioned it in my diary last year on 2nd May, which was not exactly the most exciting of days, as is evidenced by the fact that I actually noted down that I was playing FreeCell for the first time. And to celebrate that anniversary, I played my 10000th game of FreeCell at around about 2.30pm! 10000 games a year is pretty damn impressive, if I do say so myself. The grand total is now actually 10139 games, which equates to 27.78 games a day – so I’m actually down on the average count from February, despite having played about 160 games today. And for those who are interested, my win rate is now 57%. It’s going to take me a very long time to get up to 99%, I suspect: if my calculations are correct, I’ll achieve it in July 2045.
And on that note, I’m going to stop writing and do something useful. Like play FreeCell.