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| What my laptop looked like Thursday night. (Source) |
After breakfast, (two English muffins with butter, one cup of coffee - it's how I roll) I decide that spending an hour or so playing Sniper Elite 5 would be just the thing to start the long weekend.
Just a few minutes in, the screen freezes. Okay, it happens sometimes. Computer just came up, it's still doing stuff in the background, I get the occasional "wait a second, okay I'm good-to-go" pause, then things are fine.
Friday? Not so much. Screen stays frozen. My first thought "damned software wandered off someplace it doesn't know how to get back from, I'll just close the program."
What? Huh? Whaddaya mean I can't close the program?
Nope, so I had to do a "hard reset," as I like to call it. Power the beast down, wait a few seconds, then power it back up. That usually works.
Note the use of the word "usually."
Yup, press power, nothing happens. Go online via the phone, try a few suggested tricks at the manufacturer's website ...
Nada, nichts, niente, rien ...
Nothing. Zilch, cold metal and inanimate plastic.
On the company website: "rarely, the motherboard will need to be replaced ..."
Guess what?
Contacted my son, The Naviguesser, who bought me the beast, he also bought a four year warranty for it. He had to do the paperwork as everything was in his name. A few moments later I get a text from the company ...
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| What my laptop looked like Friday morning. (Source) |
"You should receive the shipping materials needed to return your laptop in five business days."
I feel really good about not getting rid of my old computer (which I am using as I write).
Really good.
Ah well, no Sniper Elite 5 for a few days (weeks? months?).
Yeah, 1st World Problem.
Almost forgot, the oil company thing. Got that straightened out. So I got to breathe a sigh of relief on that front.
Damn, I was so close to being in the 19th Century.
I shall endeavor to carry on with the tools I have to hand. (No, I didn't lose any data on the laptop, I am very much an eggs in multiple baskets kind of guy. At least I didn't lose much, yet.)
Good to have that backup, hoping it won't take long for the Big Boy to return from the Land of Repair/Replace. A neighbor has an oil tank he has to keep track of, something that becomes more important next Wednesday when it looks like below average temps arrive.
ReplyDeleteBacking up off the machine is critical.
DeleteMy laptop SSD harddrive died and I found that I was keeping too much data in desktop files... files that were not backed up :-(
ReplyDeleteHave a better weekend!
You've got to keep an eye on your data, don't rely on a service or a software app to do that.
DeleteA number of people mentioned a cloud back up, I have trust issues... lost data now but I still have trust issues. I reconfigured what get's backed up...
DeleteRob, if you have an old computer sitting around, you can yank the hard drive and get a box it goes into that is USB compatible. Turns an old hard drive into an exterior drive. When last my laptop croaked (fixing was more expensive than buying a new one) I, after getting the bad news of DEATH (screen and power connection) from my local computer gurus, I bought said box from them and had them yank the HD (solid state drive, no spinning wheel of death) and I plonked said HD into said box and had instant access to all my files, programs or otherwise.
DeleteI now do a backup about once a month or so...
The hard drive (solid state) is what went bad....
DeleteFWIW before that happened I had times where the computer needed to be rebooted. It would stop and after a minute or five I'd get a reboot sign on the screen that would not do anything. I had to push to button to turn it off then turn it back on. After that it alwasy worked until it didn't.
The local guy said he couldn't recover anything. A company on the internet said they probably could for around $400 (this was a phone call). I sent the HD to them along with $50. After awhile they said they could recover my data for $2,500... They did get down to just over a grand and would take payments :-)
Like a said, I lost the data and learned still another lesson! Life goes on...
Rob 1 - I don't trust the Cloud either.
DeleteBeans - That's old tech.
DeleteRob 2 - If the motherboard dies, ya got troubles.
DeleteIt's old tech, but they have ones that handle SSDs, so, well, they work.
DeleteNo one said old tech is bad tech. Sometimes it's, ahem, more reliable. (Said the guy typing on his ancient desktop while the far more modern laptop awaits a trip to the depot. Or wherever it is such things get repaired.)
DeleteRemember the dreaded Y2K. I was not worried. My old PC (not internet connected) thought the date was somewhere in the 1980s ever since the real time clock battery died. On the afternoon of New Years Eve, the monitor died. My first thought was "How did it know"?
DeleteHahaha!
DeleteBaokup, backup, backup. Every day, automagicly; and when I finish a piece of a document.
ReplyDeleteBe warned, there is no magic here, check it yourself, don't rely on the machine or software. Backups to the cloud expose your data to nefarious elements as well. External hard drives, memory sticks, both can make you self-reliant. Never trust Microsoft.
DeleteI have grown less enamored with my electronics as the price and quality of them has gone down. While I don't do any hard computing or gaming like you, my computer use is primarily for the internet and some Microsoft products. My current one works but it tends to get quite warm and I will probably look for the Black Friday deals or Christmas specials and replace it seeing how they are far cheaper than they were just 5 years ago.
ReplyDeleteIf you're using it mostly for internet and MS Office-type stuff, it getting warm is a sign of bad things!
DeleteIf'n it's a laptop, probably needs cleaning. Once I had a laptop and used it on my lap and it got quite warm and noisy and the computer gurus basically had to blast a small pomeranian out of said laptop, and then admonished me to use a hard surface (like a table top or a lap board) so as to keep said laptop from directly ingesting dog fur and dust from said lap. (Or cat fur, if that's how your house rolls.)
DeleteWhen you go to transfer files, you can, as I said above, get a box that your existing hard drive goes into and allows easy access via USB to your old files. And you have a nice external drive now.
If you're using MS Excel, that bugger is a resource hog and sucks the fun and speed right out of your system.
DeleteYou can download Libre Office, which is a great freeware program, for... free and it does everything that MS Word, MS Excel, Powerpoint, and other MS Office things, without as much legacy stupid bullscat code that slogs down your system, plus... it's Free.
I've used Libre Office for about 6 years now and won't go back to a MicroSerf product if I can help it.
Beans 1 - Nope.
DeleteBeans 2 - All MS Office tools are hogs. Libre Office has limitations, we use it on the classified Linux system at work.
DeleteThanks beans
Delete👍
DeleteI have a home NAS and put a little batch script on my desktop I run regularly to copy new data files off to it, so one clean copy is always off my laptop.
ReplyDeleteA good idea.
DeleteGood thing you had a backup combonculator. I've got one that can't connect to the interwebs but does allow me to read books and play Solitare, just in case I croak another laptop.
ReplyDeleteI won't get another laptop for gaming, they fry themselves.
DeleteThere's a reason gaming computers have beaucoup fans. I don't play at that level, so a laptop works for me.
DeleteI plan on going to a desktop gaming machine (someday) with the laptop for blogging while visiting grandkids.
DeleteNone of this is in the immediate future. (Could just be a pipedream!)
(Makes note to self to back thing up more frequently....)
ReplyDeleteNever a bad idea.
DeleteA good reminder to back up. Gotta go do it....
ReplyDeleteJB
Make haste.
DeleteThen there is the dreaded Windows update (With either your computer dying from problems with the previous version or about to die downloading the cure). Something to be approached with trepidation.
ReplyDeleteDepends on how old the computer is, but yeah, not a thing to look forward to.
DeleteMy initiation was that my computer was working perfectly when I left it that night. The next morning, it absolutely refused to connect to the internet (phone and tablet both did). After a day of fruitless fiddling, I carted it to the local computer hospital and left my baby in their care (the initial probable diagnosis was that the Wi-Fi transmitter probably had failed). It took them two hours to determine (they do this for a living) that an unsolicited, unannounced, and unwanted Windows update had thrashed a couple of memory locations critical to internet access. Small wonder I couldn't fix it.
ReplyDeleteIt happens.
Delete