Looks like it’s a hardware problem.
The laptop is gonna be heading in for repairs this afternoon. Last night the screen went dark and the clicking sound started up again. And after rebooting, the screen stayed dark. So far as I can tell, everything is coming up and running, it’s just that the backlight is out of whack so I can’t see anything.
So, off it goes to North Campus to have the folks there take a gander at it. In the meantime, I’m repeating yesterday’s install-from-backup trick with a desktop machine that I’m going to be hauling around for a while. It’s nowhere near as conveniant as the laptop, but I need to have something to do the sit-down with the client video edit on Thursday.
This has got the horsepower for that, and then some. It’s a dual 1 Ghz G4. I just upgraded it with a pair of 120 gig hard drives rescued from a fried PC. I’ve set them up as a striped RAID array, so it’ll be plenty spacious and speedy for video editing.