Back from the dark ages

What it means not to stay connected all day, we realised this past week. Our laptop has been behaving weird and the worst happened as expected last Tuesday. It crashed and neither of us found the time to fix it or get it fixed until last night. We have a HP Pavilion ZX5000 that has strange power issues. Despite replacing the original battery with a new one, it doesn't get charged beyond 37% and had come to a state that it required to be directly on power all the time. Then one thing led to another and soon it was shutting down automatically every now and then - sometimes as soon as I would restart it and sometimes it would go on for 4 hours. HP customer care was no help as they refused to address complaints for this particular notebook and battery series as this is not sold in India.
I guess these repeated shut downs for over 4-5 months finally led to its crash and the system wasn't even booting up. And I couldn't find the damn XP CD. Finally, borrowed it from a friend and reached till the recovery console. V's HTC Touch phone finally helped. I've been silently complaining about his spending a fortune first on the O2 and then on HTC. But it finally came to our rescue as we connected it with the Netgear setup and troubleshooted the notebook. Its back to life but the power problems exist.
Never thought life would be crippled without staying connected - delayed mobile bill payments, couldn't book flight tickets, for that matter no out-of-ordinary dinners as recipes stayed out of reach and finally no checking e-mails or blogging.