Augh! Zebra!

Today is one of a long series of jampacked and unfun days, hence the long silence. Though I will, I swear, do an AHA report one of these days. (And mincot, are you okay?)

But I have a problem -- well, I have a series of problems, but there is one which I hope you, dear Livejournal Genie, can solve. And that problem is: my laptop, what the hell?! Or to be more precise about it, I came back home at 11:30 today to find that my laptop (a year-old Lenova running Windows) had shut itself down, but would not power back up. Eventually I realized that it was not off but the screen had gone mostly, but not quite, dark -- if I hold it at a certain angle and squint, I can make out the WELCOME screen. But nothing I've tried so far, including rebooting, has restored it to where it was at 9:30 today. The screen is still dark, and also it seems to have reset itself (though it's hard to tell, since it's dark) to defaults as of a year ago, e.g. it offered me the Windows "tour."

I guess I should just haul the fucking thing in to the place where I bought it, but I won't have a minute available to do that until Saturday afternoon and I really need it NOW. No worries about data loss, because everything is backed up three ways from Sunday, but I need my damn computer.

Help me, Livejournal Genie! You're my only hope!