The Pinto of laptops

I have decided that I have the Pinto of laptops.

Since buying my Averatec 3150 over two and a half years ago, I have gotten quite a bit of mileage from it, but also a lot of problems. It had a virus right out of the box. The bottom heats up very quickly so that it often has to shut down in order to cool off. Indeed, it heats up so quickly that it was confiscated by security at Ben Gurion airport when I went to leave after attending a conference in Jerusalem. I got it back four days later with a piece of the grating over the fan missing.

Then there was the broken LCD screen. That was fixed almost a year or so ago, but it still goes dark frequently when I turn the computer on in the morning.

And now my ethernet port is broken. Though there is free WiFi in downtown Portland, my laptop's built-in WiFi sucks and the heat fries any WiFi card. If I take my laptop out onto the balcony I can get a decent connection, but I'm not strong enough to sit up for very long so I haven't been doing much more than reading email and a little bit of news.

However I think I've finally figured out how to MacGyver it, as my grandpa used to say. I've duct taped the ethernet cord to the bottom very tightly and that seems to allow me to keep a decent connection for the time being. So, hopefully I'll be able to get back to blogging.

But one of these days I soooo want the Toyota Corolla version of a laptop.