A laptop death in the family

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

So this is a post that I wrote on my new laptop. I am back in business.