Transreflective nightmares

Sad news to report:

5-23-2003 I bought my beloved NEC Versa Daylite. It was an OverPriced laptop that, feature for feature, was inferior to everything on the market with its $999 pricetag. At a grand, most laptops came with DVD, twice the HD, twice the Memory, twice the CPU, bigger screens, and still came in hundreds under its 999.

But the NEC was the only one in the market that had a transreflective screen, and at 10.4" it was also the biggest of its kind. Transreflective. That's a mighty fancy nerd word that still doesn't mean anything to anyone. It wouldn't be until the Kindle, six years later, that the world would have a similar parallel.

Its overpriced transreflective screen is a Daylite screen. This means it can be seen in full daylight, just like with the Kindle E-ink models. But unlike the Kindle's E-ink, a transreflective is Full Color. In other words, you get the full motion, full color and screen size of an iPad, With the readability and ease on the eyes of the E-Ink of the Kindle, Nook, and Sony. Transreflective is the difference between reading something printed on paper and a bright computer screen.

Without this overpriced laptop, I'd never have been able to put in the hours and hours and hours that it took to write the nine novels I have.

You see, I'm one of those that gets painful headaches if I do more than an hour of reading from a traditional screen. I wrote my first book wearing dark sunglasses and eating aspirin like candy, before finding this laptop.

It was a life changer. But, they don't make this screen anymore.

Nobody does.

Over the 9 years I've had it, the motherboard has smoked, literal smoke, 8 times. Yeah, it's had lots of problems, but I've kept repairing it because, like mentioned, the screen is irreplaceable. I've lost the Ctrl keys on the keyboard, yet I keep going. I put up with its slow processor and hampering limitations because of that beautiful, easy on the eyes, transreflective screen that has NO Backlight and give me No headaches or eye strain no matter how many hours I put in staring at it.

Today, I found out that, in a careless moment, some bug spray must have landed on it, and, over night, eaten into the thin layer of plastic on the screen. It now, and forever more, will look smudgy.

My irreplaceable. . . is now un-repairable.

This is a painful setback in my writing career.