It's a studio 15(hundred and something) - I don't have it with me and cannot recall the model number.

Sumi, most aftermarket power cords will say whether they are compatible with your model. My experience with Dell cords is that they are expensive and likely to break. Aftermarket cords are cheaper and sometimes total duds. I went through over a dozen dell replacement cords in two years. Keep your receipts.

So, I'm wanting to get DW something special for Mother's Day since she's been so friggin' awesome during my pregnancy (and she's the best mom evah!). I was thinking an iPad, but she had mentioned a laptop since we are moving our computers into the bedroom, where they'll be inaccessible when kids go to sleep. She does stuff like upload photos, just bought Lightroom, and does a lot of work in Google Docs for Shane's school. I'd like to keep the cost at $500 or less. Any suggestions?

Well, I've made an appointment with an Apple "genius" to see if the iPad mini is defective or if I somehow screwed it up. Wish me luck!

Good luck, Todd!

I have spreadsheet A which needs to be converted into CSV file B

I want to convert A to B with the least amount of stress and preferably no copy-pasting. Does Excel do this kind of field-mapping, and if so, how? Is this what a pivot table is for?

Nevermind, misunderstanding between ops and developers.

I don't understand the question - do you want to convert your Excel file to a CSV? if so, just do a "save as" and specify CSV (and make sure it's named what you want).

On what do I blame my perpetual MacBook battery issues. This is my third laptop, and third one where the battery went entirely tits up with very little fanfare.

It's probably been a week or two since I operated it not plugged into the mains, and apparently the battery holds zero charge now.

I'm still under warranty, but that's more annoying because it means this battery didn't last a year (I will quite probably extend said warranty).

Seriously--dumping water one laptop back was the smallest issue I have had with them.

I love everything about this stupid piece of shit that I don't hate.

eta: It's really helpful that OS X tells me to replace the battery. But it doesn't tell me where I can *see*, since the charge percent is a misleading hundred. Only when I click on it does it tell me the bad news.

What's the least amount of money you can get away with spending on a camera that's to record seated interviews. Reading the reviews on a couple that I found are making me slack-jawed with abject horror: [link] [link] but I have no perspective. Should I tell my sister to plonk the dosh for this: [link] ?

So my sister is graduating college and going to dental school, and she's dropped not-so-subtle hints that she wants an iPad. Or a tablet of some kind. She says she likes the Surface, but she's never really used it; she thinks the interface is cool. I don't know anything about tablets, but I want to get her something for taking notes in class and playing games (NOT in class...maybe) and whatnot. I figure the iPad (iPad 2? Isn't that the latest one?) is the best-in-class, right? She has an iPod Touch already, so she knows how iStuff works.