NOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooo!

ARGH. Daddy is not happy. Daddy is, in fact, pissed. Something bad has happened to daddy’s little portable computer thingie. Actually, I don’t think Evan did this, because I’m pretty careful about not letting him get his grubby little paws on my Mobilepro, so I’m really perplexed as to how this happened to the wi-fi card that accounts for, oh, 99% of the little machine’s usefulness to me:

As you can see, the antenna end of the wi-fi card has been physically bent upward, to the point that the casing is actually buckled. I don’t think Evan could’ve done that unless he got hold of the machine and hit a home run with it – and to the best of my knowledge this hasn’t happened. Then again, I’m not awake 24/7, regardless of what some folks in this house seem to think sometimes.

I’ve never been able to get Microsoft Activesync to connect to the Mobilepro via its serial cable on an XP machine, so it’s wi-fi or it’s nothing. I do 90% of the writing for my web site, my book projects, and sometimes even this blog on the thing. And I do a lot of it in the bathroom, which is probably more than you ever wanted to know (like I always say, this does not mean that everything I write is shit. Well, not most of it, hopefully…). This machine gets used a lot, every day – possibly more than either of my desktop machines. I answer more e-mail on this than I do on any other PC. Sure, it can’t play movies, or MP3s, or visit Flash-intensive sites, but that’s the beauty of it – I don’t really need it to do those things. I need it so I can write stuff whenever and wherever a thought strikes (an occurrence that’s becoming increasingly rare, I’ll admit). This machine is the only real reason I have a wireless router at all.

Now, you’re probably wondering what the big deal is here; the big deal is that the damage isn’t purely cosmetic. The machine can recognize that it has a card in that external accessory slot, but it can’t get power to it. One of two things has happened: the card is too damaged to seat properly anymore (since the buckled casing changes how it rests in the slot), or whatever happened to buckle the card has damaged the slot in the Mobilepro itself, meaning nothing’s ever going to work in that slot again.

Either way: not good for Zathras. The slot damage is a real possibility: my wife has an identical Mobilepro, and at one point jammed her wi-fi card into it hard enough that it bent some pins, or did something else bad. The slot no longer works, period; that means it’s replace-the-Mobilepro time. Not too tall an order, since NEC phased out the palmtop incarnation of the Mobilepro line early in this decade and went down the PDA route instead. It’s fairly easy to find a relatively new Mobilepro 780 or 790 on eBay in very good shape, because we all know palmtops were officially declared unhip at some point. Unless you’re an old fart like me who likes typing on a real keyboard rather than doing the kind of button-mashing or stylus-swordplay required for txting ur peeps.

It really doesn’t help that I didn’t exactly have wi-fi card replacement or Mobilepro replacement in my already miniscule budget. In the meantime, to calm my nerves, here’s a cute picture of Evan playing with an Intellivision controller.