Computer Woes

Well, I knew this day would come.  I´m no longer able to use my netbook here in Panama.  It broke on me about 2 weeks ago.  The frustrating this is how exactly it´s broken.

It was about a month ago when I started having problems.  The laptop was having trouble charging and would only do so when the power adapter was adjusted a certain way.  It got worse and worse until one day I had it wrapped around the netbook to charge and Magaly, a 1^st grader in my host family, tried to open the netbook and pulled the cord a bit too tight.  Ever since then I´ve had to pull the cord very tight across the netbook in order to make it charge.  Sometimes it would be charging and then suddenly lose connection without me knowing, resulting in the power draining to 0.  That sucked.  I thought (hoped) it might be a problem with the charger, so I had my parents send me another one.  Two weekends ago it came, and when I gave it a try I found out that it was the port in the computer instead of the power adapter.  After a few more days of tugging on the adapter to get a charge, it stopped working completely.  That´s the frustrating part:  I´ve got a perfectly functioning netbook, but the battery won´t charge.

I have most of the stuff backed up on my external hard drive, but there are still some things that I´d like to get off of it before I officially toss it aside.  As it happens, I´ve got a volunteer friend who´s got the same netbook as me, so next time I see her I´m gonna ask to use her netbook to charge my battery to 100%, giving me a good 8 hours to rescue any documents I didn´t have a chance to save (including 2 blog posts!).  I don´t know when I´ll be able to get that done though…we can´t leave our provinces for the first 3 months of service, meaning I may have to wait until at least the middle of June in order to see this volunteer.

Then comes the next step:  getting a new computer.  Sure I could try to get my netbook fixed as it´s just over a year and a half old, but it was already starting to run slow and I´d rather put money towards a new computer rather than put money into an old one that my have another problem not too far down the road.  So I can do one of two things.  The first would be to travel to Panama City and buy a new computer there.  I think they´re about the same price as laptops in the States so there´s no problem with that.  However, if I got insurance on it and brought it back home with me, it wouldn´t be valid in the States.  Also, Spanish keyboards are different than English keyboards.  Not by much, but enough to be a bit confusing.  I don´t know if it´d be a good or bad thing to have a Spanish keyboard, but it definitely would be a conversation starter when I got back home, haha.  Second, I can have my parents buy a netbook for me in the States and send it to me here in Panama.  If they did that, any insurance they buy would be valid when I got home and I´d have a fully English keyboard.  I´m a little hesitant about sending a new computer through the mail though, as you never know who´s hands it will pass through.  Of the two choices I´m leaning towards getting one shipped from the States to Panama.  Packages from the States have been taking between 7 and 10 business days, not too shabby, so if I wanted a computer pronto I could have one by the end of the month.  But I at least want to look at what Panama City has to offer, so I think next Friday I´ll ask for permission to leave my province and go check out their laptops, then I´ll make a final decision.

Shame this happened right when I was getting on the blog writing kick!  Internet was out at my school all last week so I couldn´t use the computers to get any posts up, but it seems to be working now so there´ll be more updates as long as there´s internet.  If you´ve got any input on a good laptop Stateside, preferably a netbook with a camera to Skype with, let me know!  Right now I´m looking at the Asus - Eee PC T101MT-EU47-BK, a netbook where the top swivels to turn into a tablet.  It looks pretty cool, but any input concerning the latest models from you guys would be awesome!

 

-Nate