On the seventh day of Whinemas, the troll gods sent to me...

7 laptop symptoms

1. it takes about 3 hours to start up
2. it completely lost sound the other day (luckily it reappeared when restarted)
3. the tabs at the bottom of my screen disappear and rearrange themselves randomly
4. it's getting increasingly resistant to the idea of multitasking
5. it doesn't have enough free memory to run scan disk
6. I have to carefully skirt around the "all programs" thing after clicking on start, if I want to get to my chosen file in less than 10 minutes
7. every few minutes it makes a hideous noise that frightens everyone who hears it and has led more than one person to enquire solicitously as to whether I may have misplaced a handful of gravel somewhere in the hard drive

If only I'd accepted my advisor's offer of a new computer when I first started. Perhaps if he
hears it groan and realises the project is reliant on the gravel not grinding away all my data,
he might offer again...

6 hours of daylight
5 doomed mice
4 sentences
3 sad tales
2 blistered heels
and a huge lack of motivation