Reminisce

Some of us fondly remember criss-crossing the county in our old Volkswagen bugs and vans.  As you churned happily down the road, out in the middle of nowhere, the car owner's worst nightmare was for one of the two little warning lights on the dash to suddenly pop on, for no apparent reason.

The red "oil" light wasn't just a gentle reminder to add a quart at the next hick town. It meant: Stop now you have no oil pressure engine failure is seconds away. When the mysterious yellow Gen/Alt light came on, the best case scenario was a broken fan belt (you usually carried a spare) but it could mean almost anything else. Certainly dollar signs went off in your head when you saw it, just like the awful "check engine" light on modern cars.

I'm having these thoughts because vague and ominous warnings are appearing on my Vaio laptop.  Unintelligible scripts popping up, locking up solid for no reason, etc. and forcing me to repeatedly turn it over my knee and yank out the battery to "reboot." 

The situation is confused because Google's Blogger (where I spend most of my time) has unusual technical problems this week.  For example, there isn't a "Quote of the Week" because I can't add new text to the sidebar.  The Google engineers claim they are "working on it" but a great hue and cry has gone up in Blogger user groups across the Internet, demanding that Google fix our free service immediately!

Anyway, back to my PC.  Is it teetering on the brink of catastrophic failure?  To add to the unease, my technical support person discovered last night that my external, automatic backup drive was not backing up automatically, in fact it hadn't backed up at all for several weeks.  Is it finally time to head to the Apple Store?