Life is full of minor setbacks. Minor setbacks are the little things that go wrong unexpectedly. Just when you think that you've gotten everything going well for once, some things come up to bite you in the ass.

Enter: Mitsuki, my Toshiba laptop.

A week ago she started exhibiting odd problems. She would reboot for no apparent reason, with the message "KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR". After a short research online, I discovered that this error is caused by either the hard drive or a faulty IDE controller on the motherboard. I installed a SMART monitor (great tool to measure the health of your hard drive!) and discovered that there were no problems. To be safe, I ran chkdsk with a surface scan. Lo and behold, no problems either. I was forced to come to the conclusion that I needed a new motherboard for the laptop.

I hopped onto PartsSearch and found this page. Yikes! Refurbished system board for $659.65. At that price, we decided that I was better off with a new laptop. So we got one.

Enter: Kozue, the new Toshiba Satellite A85.

Pictures here

Compared to Mitsuki, Kozue is much better looking, plus she fits the color scheme I'm going for in my bedroom, lol.

Oh and, in case you were wondering, I name my computers because I have/had so many that I needed a way to keep track of them, so why not name them after my favorite characters? Mitsuki was named after Kouyama Mitsuki, the teenage girl from Full Moon wo Sagashite (Searching for the Full Moon), a little girl with throat cancer who dreams of a singing career. Kozue is named after Aoba Kozue from Mahoraba ~Heartful Days~, a high school girl that runs Narutakisou, a traditional one-story Japanese apartment building in the middle of a large city. Of course, hilarity ensues when it is discovered Kozue has multiple personalities. I thought about naming her after Chanohata Tamami, but I was afraid that scary Tamami-chan would jinx the laptop. I'd rather deal with having a laptop with multiple personalities than Tamami-chan. :-P

(by the way, keep in mind that when I say Japanese names, I use the family name first before their given names)