So last night I was watching a D.V.D. in bed, on my laptop, as is my wont, when all of a sudden there was a little "pip!", almost a slight squeal of alarm, and my laptop turned itself off. And would not turn itself on again. And there was a strange kind of burning smell coming from it.
It wasn't any better this morning.
Anyway, I took this as the sign I needed to finally replace my laptop (it was several years old and the rental agreement on it had expired), so I went into the city to get a new laptop. One of the reasons I wanted to get a new one anyway was because my old one had a pretty feeble processor, and crapped out whenever I tried to, say, use iTunes (killer monster memory-eater in Windows), or play a game that's been released in the last two years (apart from the various Half-Life episodes, bless you Valve and your low system requirements!). So I found a nice one, not too expensive (about A$30 a week rental, some of which I can claim as a tax deduction 'cause it's a work machine as well), with a much better processor than my old one (they're putting 2.8GHz processors in laptops now?!). I was wavering between this one and another one, that was slower but had a bigger hard-drive, but I decided that I don't really need too much storage space.
Then when I took it to the counter the sales assistant said suddenly remembered that this one came with an external hard-drive for free.
Then he suddenly remembered that the store was also running a cash-back offer, which meant that they would (and did) give me $250 for purchasing the laptop.
Then he suddenly remembered that the laptop manufacturers were offering a free domestic flight, with purchase of one of their computers.
Turns out it was a good day to have to buy a new laptop.
(Now I just have to hope I can salvage the hard-drive of the old one. Oh, and I have to get used to Vista now, too, which is annoying.)