My laptop died 4 days ago. It was working fine, with about half the battery time remaining. I closed the top and put it on the charger. An hour later I took it off the charger and tried to start it. Nothing. Put it back on the charger but the light indicating that it was charging did not go on. Dead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Took it to a local computer repair shop. They diagnosed it as a bad motherboard. Did I experience a power surge they asked. No, nothing. It just died.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They gave me a part number. I ordered a new motherboard. The good news: it costs less than $60 (I expected it would be about $150). The bad news: it won’t arrive for a week, minimum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A week without a laptop? It is like a week without water for me. Some people can’t live without a cell phone. I can’t live without a laptop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So how am I posting this? I bought another laptop. It wasn’t my plan. I was in Costco to get large quantities of foodstuffs and saw a laptop – with touchscreen – for under $400. I decided that it would not be a bad idea to have a backup laptop. It is a good idea in general and I was not 100% confident that my old one could be resurrected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The pleasant surprise was how easy it was to get up and running with a new laptop. Much easier than the last time, several years ago. While this “automatic backup to the cloud” stuff can be annoying – and the idea of having my sensitive information on some server farm somewhere makes me nervous – it surely does make switching to a new laptop easy. Within an hour of opening the new laptop’s box I was up and running, with passwords, emails and many files recovered. I had to reinstall some software, like Thunderbird, my email client, but even that was pretty easy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So this is a post that I wrote on my new laptop. I am back in business.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My laptop died 4 days ago. It was working fine, with about half the battery time remaining. I closed the top and put it on the charger. An hour later I took it off the charger and tried to start it. Nothing. Put it back on the charger but the light indicating that it was … Continue reading