I've had my Vaio laptop for about three years now, and in the last six months have had increasing amounts of problems with the screen. For no apparent reason, it would sometimes jump, or produce a bunch of weird horizontal lines, or both. This could usually be fixed (temporarily) by squeezing the back of the screen, or (if I was pissed off) by smacking the top of it with the flat of my hand. The laptop was already eighteen months old when I got it, and the guy I bought it from warned me that the screen could be kinda hinky; he left info with me in case I needed to send it in to Sony to get fixed.

Since we're currently dealing with miscommunication between Time Warner and Earthlink, Janet's computer is still not online, so she's been using the laptop. Yesterday, it started doing it's fuzzy hinky thing again, and when Janet squeezed the back of it, she heard a small crack! and the screen completely stopped working, looking like someone had poured a brown sludge at the top, which was dripping down to the bottom. The computer itself is still working fine, and she hooked up her PC monitor to the laptop so that she could still work on it (she's so clever), but the screen is kaput. And since it would cost more to repair (or replace) the screen than I paid for the laptop, I'm just going to get a new one.

So, I'm in the market for a new laptop. The cheapest one I saw at Dell was ~$800, and at Gateway was ~$900. I think the least expensive Vaio starts at ~$1200, so that's probably out of the question. If you know of any deals going on (possibly through other computer companies), please let me know in the comments section. I'd like to find something affordable, but also light; the Vaio was a bear to carry around. I'd like to get a 15" screen again, but nothing terribly fancy as far as hardware.

Also, if you know anything about transferring email messages and the address book from Outlook Express on one computer to the other, I would greatly appreciate it. I have a crapload of email on my laptop (since it was serving as my primary internet computer), including over seven hundred messages from my lady, all of which I would like to keep, if possible.

In other news, Jamie just sent out his first submission for publication, a poem to the liberally-minded Adbusters. Also, following Greg's example, please consider donating to the Strange Horizons April fund drive; a signed copy of Four Seasons is one of the cool prizes you'll be eligible for, and you'll be helping a great fiction magazine keep on keepin' on (read Ray Vukcevich's story "Magic Makeup" in this week's issue if you haven't already). Also, the 2004 Durham Bulls season opened yesterday. And finally, the North Carolina Literary Festival (which was just mentioned at Locus and the News and Observer) kicks off tomorrow night with Alice Walker's keynote speech; wish me luck.

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The Trial by Franz Kafka

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