With friends like these...

Well, I'm back on my old laptop again.

It's been a hell of a pain, this past week, I can tell you that much. First I was getting a laptop, then I wasn't, then I was again, then the laptop I actually, finally got is FAULTY. The screen was doing a funky thing that it shouldn't have been doing. I called Laskys to arrange a replacement at such time as they had it in stock, but this morning the problem was worse, so I thought, feck it, I'll just get my money back. After I spoke to my dad he found out that the people who supply the university he works at had 16 in stock, and he could get one, so we agreed that he could do that, and I called Laskys to tell them I'd decided not to wait, and just wanted my money back instead.

They said that was fine, but I needed to call Samsung to get an RMA (return merchandise authorization), so I called Samsung, and they told me that Laskys needed to call themselves to get it because they didn't give RMA numbers out to customers. Fair enough, I thought, and called Laskys back to tell them this. They didn't understand, since they're not technicians, and can't go through any troubleshooting with me, but they did their best. Around this point I got cut off and had to call back, and was talking to a different person who thankfully understood what was going on. She got in touch with Samsung, and attempted to go through troubleshooting with me, but she didn't really know what she was doing.

Eventually, she told me that she would call Samsung and try to sort something out, and would call me back ASAP or pass on the problem to someone to call me back in the morning. Five minutes later, I got a call back from a man called Mark, who asked me if I'd caught the name of the person I'd spoken to at Samsung. I hadn't. He then asked me for the serial number of the laptop as the person who had written it down before had written it down wrong, and he got back on the phone with Samsung again. In that time, the line went dead, and I got cut off again.

I waited five minutes, then called back, and was on hold for ten minutes before I finally got connected.. thankfully to Mark again, who had said he'd been trying to call me back. He said he had everything he needed to put through the return, and that I'd receive a confirmation email (though I'm not holding much hope out for that). They're sending a courier on Tuesday, so I'll need to be up all day for that, and as soon as they get the laptop back they'll put my refund through. Huff.

I just hope I've been unlucky with this particular one, and that the one dad has got (same model) doesn't have the exact same problem. But, he's going to boot it up at his house to check it, since he'll have it until Boxing Day.

Augh. So, I'm back on my old laptop with the noisy fan, dodgy hard drive and sticky S key, but at least it still works. <3 And it's somewhat comforting because I know all of its little tics and issues, so it's not making me paranoid by doing unexpected things.

Having some weird trouble today.

My sister asked me who voiced Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story, and so I went to check IMDb, which wouldn't load. Wikipedia also wouldn't load. Through checking my bookmarks I found that Hotmail and DeviantART also wouldn't load. I checked on my other browsers, and they still wouldn't work. After I poked around on the internet for a while I found that several sites I was trying to use to check why it might be happening wouldn't load either. However sites like Livejournal, tumblr, Gaia, AOL mail and the webcomics I read would load fine, as would Facebook.

So, I figure, it has to be a virus, though I don't know how I got it since I haven't gone onto any sites that I wouldn't normally. I set Avast up on a boot-time scan (scanning before Windows boots up and before viruses have the chance to activate) and it found two PUPs, which I deleted. When the computer started up again it seemed to have worked - the sites that wouldn't load before would load up... for about five minutes. Wikipedia and DeviantART still won't work (though DeviantART seems to be getting halfway there before it quits) and several of the other wikia sites I use occasionally (Fable, Fallout, Stargate) will refuse to load until repeatedly refreshed, when they will connect and work fine. Hotmail and IMDb will now load perfectly well also.

I've tried a system restore, which did nothing, and have also tried temporarily turning off my firewalls, which also did nothing. As a suggestion off a website I tried flushing my DNS... which also did nothing. I tried logging onto a guest account on my laptop and couldn't access the sites on there either, which makes me think it's a network issue.

I really have no idea of where to go from here and would really appreciate suggestions. I don't think it's a virus, since I've never heard of any virus behaving this way. Also, having just checked, I know that the problem websites WILL load if I use a proxy.

What the heck is even going on.

I haven't slept properly in about a week. For some reason my brain is seeing fit to wake me up at 8.20 AM, after only having been asleep for six hours, and it's done this twice. Perhaps it wouldn't be bothering me so much, but the night before this first rude awakening, I hadn't slept at all aside from a few hours in the afternoon.

I'm wondering if I'm waking up because I'm cold. Perhaps I'll put another layer on my bed tonight and see if it helps at all. At the moment, though, I feel sick. My stomach is wedged somewhere in my throat and making things very uncomfortable for me. Urgh.

In other news, I realised that the memory card in my phone has died on Tuesday. It may have happened before then, but it was some time between when I last used ebuddy, and Tuesday evening. I'm not sure what happened, exactly, but it's gone kaput. I can't even access it using the USB link-up from my phone. My music files have gone, my photos, and I can't use ebuddy anymore, but I can still message, call and use the internet. Strange, huh?

Today, only about an hour ago in fact, my laptop began to make a clicking sound. I knew what was going to happen, but it didn't stop the rush of panic as my laptop bluescreened and rebooted. Thankfully it started up with no problems, and I'm now running a virus scan and such, and have my laptop on a table to stop it overheating. Hopefully it was having it on the sofa that caused the shutdown, and there's nothing seriously wrong with it. When my technology fails, it always seems to happen in a cascade. Sometimes I wish I were more tech savvy so I could work out when something was seriously wrong, but I was in so much shock that I didn't even manage to make a note of the error code. Blargh.

On to more personal things. The lack of sleep - continual lack of sleep - lately is beginning to have adverse effects on my health. I feel sick all the time, everything I eat gives me stomach ache, and my only current pleasures are an RP site I'm on, a lovely Alfred I'm RPing with over email, and my biffle amael_elen , who I love to pieces. I had to leave class an hour early on Tuesday, and yesterday my professor recommended that I not go in at all, so I stayed home, much to the displeasure of my mother who seems to think I'm doing all of this on purpose.

Yes, because I enjoy waking up at a god-forsaken time after not enough sleep and spending all day feeling like my stomach is turning inside-out and my eyes are drying up in my skull. Isn't that everyone's idea of a good time? God.

I may not be online tomorrow. Or the day after. Or for some time. My laptop is broken. Not happy.