My goddamn laptop just decided to, AGAIN, not bother turning on its fucking backlight. Without a fucking screen backlight, YOU CAN'T SEE WHAT THE FUCK'S ON THE SCREEN! Now, the good news is I have a dual-monitor setup, so I can just move to one screen and everything works (except that I have to move everything on the same screen, which sucks an ass's arse's left testicle. But THIS TIME, the fucking trackpad decides to interpret a click instead of a drag... RIGHT WHILE I'M ON THE "LAPTOP ONLY" option. This, of course, has to be dealt with immediately! So now everything's on the laptop screen (with no backlight), and the monitor is disabled. So I try restarting in safe mode to see what happens. Well, it goes to the monitor... but the DISPLAY OUTPUT option isn't available, because that's in a SPECIAL DRIVER, and I'm in safe (ie FAIL) mode. So, I restart to normal mode, hoping that it'll just take hold anyway. It doesn't. Everything's outputting to the laptop screen with no backlight. I remember that there's a "safe mode with networking support", so I try that. After all, the resolution and refresh rate might suck, but it is at least possible to see. But no. By "networking support", it means "your ethernet connection might work". But of course, I'm one of the last people in the world with shit dial-up, so it doesn't bother letting me use the modem. So I reboot again. Obviously I can't really see a damn thing, but I can at least make out basic shapes if I align the screen JUST SO to let it catch the light (which has to be RIGHT NEXT to what you want to see-- any further there's not enough light, any closer and it's just glare). So I eventually succeed in getting the monitor to work, but the screen still doesn't.
This isn't the first time this has happened, so I'll just wait for it to work again (as always happens). But this time I'll actually complain to the manufacturer. I won't name them yet, but I'll post about how it goes.
