Things have been pretty hectic as of late. What with a dissertation to write, a wedding and a stag do to attend, and my fiancé's birthday to plan and buy presents for, November has been a busy month.
On Saturday the 14th, I had a massive of shock to the system in the form of my hard drive unexpectedly and unexplainably dying. Had I backed up my files? Of course not, it's a Macbook. They're invincible! Well, I've learnt the hard way that this is very much not true.
I took my laptop to the Apple shop in Southampton the following Monday, expecting them to press a few buttons and pronounce it cured. No such luck. The guy in the shop said they would replace the broken hard drive and fix the slight damage to my keyboard (the result of a design flaw in the magnets used to close the screen), but it would cost me £120 for the new hard drive. I didn't really have much of a choice, I couldn't go without a computer.
The guys in the shop were really understanding and got the job done within the afternoon because Lauren and I had to get back to Portsmouth. When I arrived back in the shop at 4.30 to collect my laptop they even let me keep the old hard drive so I could try to retrieve the files (they don't provide that service).
And here's the point where the day brightened up considerably. It turns out my laptop was still within it's warranty, so I didn't have to pay after all! So although I may have lost my pictures, music, and most importantly, my uni work (I have paper copies of a lot of it though), I got a new 120g hard drive to replace my old 80g one, an updated operating system, and a spotless new keyboard. Bless Apple and their customer support!
My housemate's dad is going to give my old hard drive to a friend of his who managed to retrieve his files when the same thing happened to him, so hopefully I won't have lost it all. Otherwise I'll 40 pages of dissertation to rewrite over Christmas.
.jpg)
Because she felt sorry for me, Lauren bought me a new Wii game to cheer me up, Medal of Honour: Heroes 2. I had wanted it for ages because it got really good reviews but I never could find it in any game shops, probably because it was quite popular when it came out. It's a pretty standard war first-person shooter in terms of story, gameplay and graphics, but the Wii motion controls have been used really well to make the game fun and innovative. There are some nice touches, like tossing grenades with the wiimote and realistic hand positions when using weapons like mounted machine guns and RPGs. However, I'm very tempted to get Call of Duty: Modern Warfare: Reflex as I don't have an Xbox 360 or PS3 to play the original on, and it got a good review on Gamespot. Maybe when the price comes down I'll give it some thought.
