I dodged a big one tonight by the skin of my teeth, ladies and gents!

One of the key components of my ability to play DDO is distracting my wife with Facebook games, which she plays in front of the TV on a laptop. Tonight I was playing with the dog on the couch, with the laptop nearby and plugged in. One thing lead to another, and the laptop was on the ground. After getting it to reboot, the screen had a red hue to it. To top it all off, we have owned this laptop for exactly 20 days (to long to return) as it was the replacement for the last laptop with a failed monitor.

Ok, this is me, in deep, deep... druid wolf pup droppings.

After enjoying a short barrage of looks from my wife that would curdle milk, and her picking up her phone to tell her friends via text (and her mom on the phone who picked that moment to call), I scooped up the laptop and proceeded into the second room. Now, I'm not a maximum PC user, but I have built a few systems from scratch and fixed a few friends PC's in my day. However, I have never worked on a laptop. Feeling under the gun, I fired up Yahoo! and hit the interwebs.

After finding the manual online and taking the wifes brand spanking new laptop into the most number of pieces I have ever gotten a laptop into, I reassembled the monster (so many screws....) and fired it back up.

Red hue is gone.
....
Profit.

I feel so encouraged by this development I might experiment to see if I can get the old laptop functional again. I will have to wait, however, until my fingers heal. There were so many little plastic edges and such inside that machine that I feel like I have dozens of paper cuts on my fingertips. By the way, there are some weird connectors inside laptops. Several internal connectors, like the Keyboard, are done by sliding a flat plastic ribbon like cable into a slot and flipping a plastic clamp down to make the connection. Personally, I think I like the click into place type connectors better.