Government agencies, oh how I hate thee.

If you follow my twitter or have talked to me in the past month or 2, it should be common knowledge that I need a new computer like I need oxygen. As of around this time last week, I became fairly certain that there’s a piece of failing hardware sitting in this computer somewhere, but I haven’t determined if it’s hard drive failure, or even better, my video card. Either way, something in this machine is hosed good and proper. Shane knew this thing was fallin’ over in February when he was here and forced to use it for 3 weeks. We tried to get me a new computer back then, and got told to go to hell, since we didn’t go through the proper bureaucratic clusterfuck…i mean channels… to do it. So last week this thing really starts tanking hardcore. Graphics driver stops responding, typically when I’m viewing a graphic-heavy webpage. Sometimes it crashes the system and forces it to reboot by itself, other times it just hangs for a sec, then recovers. Oh, also? hey Windows7? there’s supposedly another gig of ram in this machine, please to be using it. Unless it, too, has gone south, which honestly wouldn’t surprise me.
That said, I did what every smart broke college student does, and contacted the guy who furnished me with the damn thing in the first place. His answer looks somewhat similar to, “Nope, sorry, can’t help you.” He referred me to one of the guys in the tech department who could *maybe* fix it over the phone. Well, of course he can’t fix it over the phone, because I can’t make the system misbehave on command, and I definitely can’t make it exhibit all its various “things that make ya go wtf,” during the span of one phone call. If he can’t fix it, then I can have my counselor put in a referral to have the guy come employ my restore disks and restore the system back to XP, which Microsoft will soon cease to support, and which therefore may or may not be useless on Fitchburg State’s network in the very near future. If it is indeed a hardware failure, then I have to send it back to Lenovo. And if the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind doesn’t pay for it, (which he sounded pretty sure that they wouldn’t), I have to pay for it. And I don’t even wanna know how much it’d run me to have any necessary hardware repairs done, seeing as Acer wanted to charge me $100 to fix a tiny little freakin’ power socket. Or, a suggestion from the mother, I could take it to one of the local repair shops, have them reformat it and pay them $70 to do something I could have Shane and a willing sighted person do for free. No thanks, I’m all set with that, really, I am. So that’s where I stand for now, but I have a sneaking suspicion it doesn’t end there, or at least it may try not to.

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