Over the past couple of years I have had several issues with my Toshiba laptop, which I use for virtually everything. My first mistake was probably buying it from PCWorld, generally recognised as the crappiest dealer in the UK. A few months after purchase, in autumn 2004, the mousepad stopped working (despite any amount of fiddling around with drivers I tried). Annoying, but because I also had an external mouse, so I kept putting off the complaint. I also didn't receive a CD key for OneNote, the Office application bundled with it (I eventually got it after phoning up, and immediately realised it wasn't worth it), and there are various other little nitpicks which weren't quite big enough to warrant a claim on the £9.99 a month "PCSurgery Cover". Now though, my computer has had enough, because Saturday was the day the bytes bit back.

In the morning, I tried installing the Supreme Commander demo, reasoning that my 1524 GB of RAM would easily make up for the 300MHz difference in processor speed, seeing as all the other system requirements were fulfilled. Nope. It didn't even try to run properly, not even giving me a chance to put it on minimum settings before blowing a raspberry in my face and shouting "Ensure system meets minimum requirements". Ok, I thought, that's disappointing, but it's not really unexpected, SupCom is extremely demanding after all. So, not a little discouraged, I moved on to Just Cause, you know, that game that does away with the laws of physics, just to see what all the fuss was about. After the install, the demo took objection to my GPU, which I know for a fact has pixel shaders 2.0, and once again splattered my visage with virtual saliva ("ERROR: Please use a graphics card that supports pixel shaders 1.1 or 1.2"). The one thing I really hate about demos is that the developers rarely bother to support more than a couple of different GPUs with them. So annoying... 

Well ok, I thought, my unspoiled optimism once again shining through, Just Cause is probably rubbish anyway, so I shut down and went to watch some TV. Coming back later on, I started up the system for a little Dawn of War, fantasising about how i wuz gunna krush dose spaise marieney boiz wid ma orky WAAAGH!!!. Startup complete, I noticed that my sound had stopped working, my taskbar had gone, Windows Defender needed a patch (which I had already downloaded a fortnight ago) that I couldn't get becuase I didn't have an Internet connection in that location, and Windows Desktop Search Index had decided to break. Oh and HomeWorld 2 seems to have uninstalled itself for no good reason. After a while fruitlessly doing diskchecks and trying in vain to get GoBack to remember a time before eight o'clock saturday night, I gave up, and decided to let those idiots at PCWorld see if they can do any better. I'm taking it in tonight, but I'm not getting my hopes up. One of my friends who relied on PCW ended up with a formatted hard drive, two extra viruses on it and a broken (yes, BROKEN) cooling fan...I really should have backed up my files...