Not the screen!

Argh! I really, really do not like my laptop at the moment.

I'm sitting here typing, and the screen goes black. No warning, just -blip!-down it goes. The lights are on (ie, the computer is running), but no one is home. To say this in frustrating is the least of the things I could state about it.

The most frustrating thing about it is when it does this while I'm online, there's no way for me to save what I'm doing.

So, what have I been doing? Forced shut-down, that's what! Hold down the power key, and force it to shut down that way. Wait a bit, turn it back on, and I have a screen again! But while the wallpaper is there, the icons come back slowly. This is the second time this has happened in the last three, maybe four, days. Diddle the mouse - nothing. Try a few keys - nothing. Have to forcibly turn it off.

I am not happy about this. On the plus side, I use Fire Fox for my web browser pretty exclusively, and anytime Fire Fox shuts down unexpectedly (like, as what happens in a forced turn-off), it automatically asks if you want to restore the previous session when you open it again.

Alas, my local "tech support" is working 12-hour days, and most likely would repeat what my brother recommended: take it in for diagnostics.

Well, I've done that before, back when I first started having screen issues; they company I bought the lap top from told me it was most likely a software issue, and if that was the case, their warranty-included hardware diagnostic would run me $60 that I don't want to spend.

In the meantime, since this did start recently, it's most likely has the root problem in one of the programs that were installed recently. So, I'm going through my list of programs in the "Add or Remove Program" portion of my control panel, and getting rid of stuff I don't use. And something very important has come to my attention: I don't know what half of these programs are for.

This is extremely annoying, because it means that I don't know if it's safe for me to uninstall them of not. The one that I presume is the problem told be it's being accessed by another program and would not be uninstalled. I find this very disturbing, and also annoying.

Hey, Microsoft! How about making it so the programs in the "Add or Remove Programs" area also give a little description for what they do?