Last week and without any prior warning my laptop decided to play up.  Just couldn’t get it to boot up and spent a day watching that little necklace of beads going round and round as it went in an interminable loop of diagnosing and attempting to sort the problem.  My last laptop completely died without any notice- just a black screen and that was it almost as if someone in a leading computer retailer decided it was time I bought a new one and pulled some plug somewhere which set it into terminal decline (!)

I learnt a lesson after that and this time…….I had insurance.  I know that means I’ve probably paid for a brand new laptop many times over but now its enabled my laptop to go away to computer hospital and I have a loan one to write to you all on this morning.  Last time I lost virtually everything, but this time I’ve been a little bit canny and regularly backing up files onto a flash drive on the first day of each month.  Last week, as you will no doubt work out it was the last of the month, so my canny plan fell a bit adrift, as everything I have been working on over the past month may have gone.

That includes the review that I was planning to post today.  All may not be lost however as the latest update I have from knowhow.com is that my laptop is currently undergoing data rescue and they may be able to save what I was working on.  So, I ummed and ah’d as to whether I just wait and see if all is lost before trying to recreate in my head what I was working on and I’ve decided to wait -so no proper review today………….

Apparently the fault on the hard drive may have been caused by me switching it on and off too much.  It seems there are only a limited number of times you can switch on and off and go through the initial booting up process without the hard drive getting either magnetised or de-magnetised (I was in too deep a trauma at the time to listen to which).  If I use my laptop five times during a day, I switch it off five times during that day.  This is apparently wrong, you should avoid switching it off at all if you are going to be using it.  The guy I spoke to said his laptop had been on for something like 167 days. Who knew?  I thought they’d burn out if you left them on overnight!  In fact, when it went into its loop of trying to repair itself and I left it on after I’d gone to bed to see if it could sort itself out I got up a couple of times in the night just to check it was alright.  I’m from a different era.  My parents used to pull out the aerial form the back of the TV each night in case of thunderstorms- I think I’m becoming like them.

I also asked the guy how often he backed up his data and he said every ten minutes in three different places so my once a month routine feels a little pathetic, however righteous I felt when doing it.  This loan laptop wipes everything off every time I switch the power off, so maybe I’m just going to have to bite the bullet over the next few days and leave it on standby……….  Hopefully, normal service will be resumed shortly.