fecking laptop!

Well, I may be back but I didn't leave my laptop's problems behind me. I'm still getting all my display problems: the screen either greys out, goes to a negative image creeping up from the bottom right up, goes completely blank, crashes back to 640x480/16-color resolution or I just get a BSOD related to the ATI drivers. Also, sometimes when I'm playing gams, the machine will just shut down without warning. Naturally as well, all the hard rebooting isn't doing any of my other apps any good - have had to reinstall firefox and bitcomet a few times 'cos they got corrupted after a hard reboot.

It doesn't seem to matter what versions of the ATI drivers I put on, it just keeps on crashing. For a while I thought that one of my firefox tabbrowser extensions was causing some of the havoc, and it does seem like it isn't crashing as much since I got rid of it, but we're still getting crashes. Also, one wierd problem has resurfaced. Before I went to China, I was having some strange errors with the 'e' key not working while I was typing. When I went to China, the problem disappeared. Now that I'm back in Ireland, the problem is back again. Wierd.

Going to do a 'slash-n-burn' on the laptop soon, wipe the entire hard drive and reinstall from scratch. Only prob is, my windows install CD is scratched to shit, and windows is so flakey now that the CD burner won't burn properly - keep getting drinks coasters.

Hopefully that and the gfx thing are software issues, don't fancy sending the laptop back to the shop!