Sunday afternoon as I was getting Tiff squard away in her new Hosted Status, and generally annoying anyone I could get ahold of on MSN the left hand ctrl button on my laptop popped off. I was annoyed to say the least. Missing buttons look ugly and ghetto. To say the least... Really I was more concerned with the asthetic more than I was any function.

Then I got to realizing how much I use that damn key for cut and paste...

Anyhow I did some quick research... this is how you replace said button, this is how you replace keyboard. So, at worst it was going to be a few screws and a ribbon cable. No big deal right? Wrong first of all acctually finding a way to order the part from HP is nightmareish, Not to mention they want you to input your computer model number on every other page. After an hour of looking, and discovering that it wouldn't let me order the damn part, and another few hours futzing with the key to try and make it go back on... I settled on having to make a warrenty claim.

I finnaly sent HP an email yesterday. They responded. The keyboard is one unit, as such they do not service a single key, instead they swap out the whole keyboard. Now seeing as the keyboard is an internal componate, the swap has to be performed by trianed service personel.

They are sending me a service tag. I have to ship them my laptop for repair. This distresses me. Especialy as they said I need to back up all files on the laptop, as pert of the service requires them performing a restore.

I don't want them to resotre it. I just want them to swap the keyboard and send it back. What does restoring the hard drive have to do with a missing Ctrl button? Is the key going to magically reappear if they do a restore?? No.

So yeah I am less than thrilled I'm going to be relegated to the Celeron laptop for 5-10 days... Its slow. I booted it up last night for the first time in a year or so. I'm going to have to do a resotre on that machine just for it to be operable. Which is, yeah not fun.

Speaking of, I have to do the same thing to the desktop. It could use a little freshening as well.

Anyhow, the end run out of all of this is I am going to be without a great computer for a while. I'm going to be without word for a while, much less the ability to code or upload chapters.

In other news... I need to clean more then the hard drives on my systems.

Shakespere is... dialogue pretty much.

History is still history to which I get to take notes for a group-mate who won't be there this friday (yes class on Holloween) and email them to her. I dunno how I am going to pull that off just yet, given my Ctrl problem.

December is going to be great!

Steve