very dying laptop

My laptop is essentially dead... or at the very least so close to dying that it makes no nevermind.

I'm currently typing this using Safe Mode... I've been using Safe Mode for two days now.

After the trauma I suffered back in October I've been treating the laptop slightly more gingerly. I mean it's had some issues because the hard drive was filling up (mostly due to my photos), but on Sunday I'd booted it up first thing in the morning, same as always... and then left it to it's own devices while I took some photos of the Lego Easter Bunny.

Halfway through I happened to look at the screen and saw that it had somehow turned into a Blue Screen of Death (BSoD)... not the permanent one, but it was enough to freak me out. Then it tried the "can't find the hard drive" trick it pulled back in October... but I wasn't having any of that, so I just unplugged it and plugged it back in again and it found the drive just fine.

However now when it's booted up normally it seems to be okay for a little while, but as soon as I open a program or a window (or it may just be after it's been turned out for a while, I'm not completely sure) it completely freezes up.

But it works almost perfectly in Safe Mode... you know, other than the whole "ability to watch any video or open Photoshop" thing.

Fortunately Safe Mode meant that I could get in and dump all the photos and stuff that I'd accumulated in the last six months onto the external hard drive I bought during the October panic.

Which means that I'm going to be forced to go shopping for a new laptop... which is problematic for a number of reasons, not least of which is the cost, but also the fact that I loathe Windows 8.

Plus I don't completely know what I actually want... I know I want:

• something with the largest hard drive possible, since that's usually where I run into trouble with all my devices
• it should be able to run games, but it's not a rig specifically for that purpose
• a big screen is good, although I know that on laptops they only get so big and I'm okay with that
• it needs Photoshop (although I think I'm going to have to settle for Photoshop Elements due to the costs)
• Speed and memory are good, if only due to the requirements of using Photoshop and doing a lot of photo editing
• I'd prefer not to have Windows 8, but I know that's an unlikely proposition in the current environment

The only thing I haven't tried is to do a System Restore, but I can't see that doing a lot of good, since I didn't actually install anything new or even update anything as far as I can remember... it seems to be a randomly occurring fault.

As always though it couldn't have come at a worst possible time.

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