Last week I took delivery of a new Dell desktop. Bear in mind, at this point, that Kevin and I between us own four Dell laptops and they’ve behaved very well. I’ve never had any trouble with mine save for a rather old hard drive dying on me. So the new machine arrived last Friday and I spent the next few days getting it set up. Today it actually had some serious work to do. Hours and hours of running economic models. And after about 5 hours of this it died. Kevin and I have just come off the phone with Dell Tech Support (and interesting combination of accents: one US, one UK and one Indian) and guess what, we need a new motherboard. At this point I suspect that Karen Traviss and David Brin are laughing themselves silly and saying, “I told you so.” And you know, I think they might be right.

Anyway, the machine is on warranty. (I’ve only had it a week!) A technician will be calling me next week to arrange a visit. In the meantime, because I do have serious work to do, Spike and Temeraire, my two laptops, are going to be working their little backsides off.