Payday! (and laptop woes) in Chunky giblets

Which quickly segues into “I wish it was payday again”.

I had to buy a new keyboard today. For those who aren’t aware, I have two laptops; one is a Vostro 1540, a low-end dual-core I bought for way more than I should have a bunch of months back. It’s not great but it does the job and is great for streaming, watching videos, DVDs, playing retro, etc. It also has the distinction of having a working Goddamn AV jack.

The Vostro 3550 I have is fairly beastly. It has a somewhat decent Core i5 processor and 8GB of RAM. The GPU isn’t incredible but it can play The Witcher 2 on full settings at somewhere around 60FPS, and that’s all that matters to me. I can technically run Fallout 4 on it, but it’s a horrible experience and I think New Vegas and Fallout 3 were far, fare superior in any event, and both of those run like a fucking dream.

Here’s the problem. The 3550 has a broken AV jack, which means I have to use the 1540 to charge up my batteries. This is far less hassle than you’d imagine, although it means I can’t play with the power plugged in and so therefore have to have it on battery saver, which reduces the performance of the games I’m playing. Fallout New Vegas is fine that way; Bulletstorm isn’t so good, Bioshock Infinite crawls, and The Witcher 2 is a slideshow. So I have to get that repaired.

But the 1540 last night decided to shunt the hard drive loose, and unlike EVERY OTHER FUCKING LAPTOP ON THE PLANET I had to take off the keyboard in order to get to the HD. I re-plugged it back in and now it works fine again.

Except.

I accidentally unplugged the keyboard when I was taking it apart and now the keyboard refuses to slot back in.

Fuck it; I bought a USB keyboard today and I actually prefer this, because I don’t have to hunch over the fuckin’ screen. Since I’m planning on giving this laptop to D when I get my 3550 repaired, I might just get another keyboard because for a tenner it’s pretty slick. No special features, but I never saw the appeal of “gaming keyboards” - a hundred quid for a keyboard that lights up? No thanks.

Yeah well anyway that’s that.