I'm back! At last. (Note: most of this is a rant about how annoyed I am that this took as long as it did. The short version is: my laptop's back but there's no guarantee that the problem's actually been fixed, which puts limits on what I can do with it until I've confirmed whether it has been or not.) My computer actually came back a week after we sent it off, but after failing to find any of the problems I mentioned they installed some updates that in fact changed absolutely nothing, so I returned it immediately. Well, 'immediately'... not quite, as Dad insisted on my getting photographic evidence of the screen crashing as the tech people insisted that they hadn't found a problem with it. Never mind that the instant I opened my computer up upon getting it back the screen crashed; when I tried to invoke the problem by messing around with the screen and constantly restarting my laptop at an unprecedented rate, it refused to crash until Dad was about to leave, without my computer if we couldn't get evidence, and I only managed to get a photo at the last minute when the screen was mostly white fuzz rather than the rather impressive sepia it had started off with. (I'm not saying that any of this was anyone's fault, but it's still utterly infuriating and proves more than ever that my laptop doesn't like me.) Anyway, although the tech people still apparently have found no evidence of the problem, they have returned my laptop after playing with some of the cables connecting to the screen. And I've been using it for most of this evening and *touches wood* nothing's gone wrong, so I think it's fine. Probably because I was browsing TV Tropes for all that time instead of doing actual work, because in the latter scenario it would have crashed at the perfect time to make me lose most of said work, but after nearly a month of using school computers with keyboard layouts that keep exposing my muscle memory problems, I'm prepared to make generous assumptions. If after a week my laptop is still fine, I will assume the best of it. Until then, because my 'save' functions on this website are tenuous at the best of times and I don't want a crash to result in losing all my work on something: Any art I release will be traditional, as losing a project containing a photo of art is considerably less frustrating than losing the art itself (and since this is a whole-computer problem, no, switching to something other than SVE will not help circumvent this; Work on 'The Server' is indefinitely postponed. There's a good chance this will continue for more than a week if the problem shows up again in that time, as it'll take a while for me to come up with a way to work around unpredictable screen crashes that can only be resolved by a complete restart, if workarounds even exist. Also, it's going to be a while before I'm done going through my messages. (They're all going to be studio notifications, but still. I'm going through them all.) Actually, having to use different computers all the time has been good for me. Not daring to procrastinate because there are actual people checking my search history is a lot more powerful an incentive than just knowing my homework will be late, and I've gotten into the habit of shutting my laptop down fully rather than shutting the screen, using USBs and the cloud to store things, and not leaving tabs or windows open.
