My Dell is back!
It is incredible how bright the new LCD shines in my repaired (out of warranty, of course) Dell Inspiron. The machine came back yesterday—about 5 days of loss, measured by the first post on this issue.
Since the loss caused me to use Office 2007 in my virtual machine instead of old-ass Office 2003 on the Dell host, I am probably going to stay on the virtual machine and uninstall Office ’03 on the host. This implies (to me) that my relatively shallow investments in Excel, PowerPoint and Visio could be converted into OpenOffice.org since I am reluctant to install all these programs on my VM. Web searches suggest that my very limited use of PowerPoint can be replaced by Impress—ditto for Excel by Calc. But I might actually have to install Visio—well, Draw might just get me close enough…
My willingness to experiment seems to be revived now that I can actually see what I am doing on the Dell. It looks clear to me that, for the last few months, the gradual dimming of the old LCD had a profound psychological impact on me… an accidental cruel practical joke…