"What no Post Today!"

You might have found yourself asking this question yesterday with my distinct absence from posting. I have posted almost everyday since returning to regularly blogging in recent months, with the occasional Saturday or Sunday missing, but it is rare that I miss a weekday.

Until Yesterday.

More about this in a few minutes, but the main thrust of my article today is that my laptops hate me.

Back in the mid-90s I had a desktop PC (Pentium II with 2Gb harddrive and 16Mb Ram for those of you who are interested) but within a few years I had moved on to laptops. I definitely had my first one with me in Kosovo in 2001 and I seem to remember that machine was pretty good.

However, a year or so later I replaced it with a now defunct TINY branded computer and the problem was that its fan was mounted on a very thin aluminium spike which soon warped and bent and from that moment onwards it never spun properly again. Numerous repairs never helped and all it did was overheat and crash. 

Then I got the best one ever - my Toshiba that was allergic to electricity.

Working on its battery it was perfectly fine, but when connected to the mains (which inevitably I had to do) I would have between 20 seconds and 20 minutes to do something before it froze and I had to hard shut it down. So the less said about that the better.

I think my Samsung, the last one with a DVD drive, was ok apart from being a bit heavy and not too mobile. It was slow to boot up, but looked like a Ferrari when compared to what came next.

My next laptop was a beautiful shiny, red Lenovo with the most perfect keyboard and it was beautiful to use, at least it was when it woke up. It was my last laptop with an HDD hard drive and I am not joking when it could take up to two hours to boot up. I literally had to get up half an hour earlier than I would normally (even allowing extra time on top of getting up for breakfast etc) to turn it on before doing anything else and if I was lucky it might be ready for my first client more than an hour later. It was so slow it was ridiculous and going into the boot up menu and turning off all the extras made no difference.

Moving on, I got an HP, as had been the one I had in Kosovo which had served me well. Again it was a good machine until suddenly one day a Windows update killed it with the white / yellow screen of death. Believe me if you have not encountered this before it makes the so called Blue Screen of Death look like a minor inconvenience. The DOS / Set up screens worked perfectly fine but nothing I do can fix it. I have reformatted the hard drive, clean installed Windows 10 and 11 (of course only one of them at a time), updated the BIOS and always with the same result. Once I got two days of stability out of it before it did it again.

So, as a matter of urgency, I had to  go and get this one I am on now. After such a shitty history, I thought to myself what make should I buy?

MamaRah has had an Acer since 2017 and other than swapping the older HDD hard drive for a newer sleeker SSD one it has served her perfectly - although the screen is finally beginning to go in one corner. Nine f**king years and at times I wonder if I will get nine months out of mine.

So, I drew the logical conclusion and bought a mid-price Acer. What can go wrong?

Well it's me and laptops so of course something can go wrong! After a few months of usage I noticed my power cable was loose where it connected with the socket in the side of the computer. It is a very thin pin for a power cable as it is and MamaRah's Acer has a nice chunky one. As time went on it became a bigger problem, my computer started hard shutting down to protect itself as the battery light was coming on and off all the time. The computer does this as a preservative measure when power supply is intermittent. No good when in a client meeting.

I will go and get a new power cable I thought to myself.

I duly did so and tested it in the shop and still the battery light was blinking intermittently. It could only happen to me. The logical conclusion was of course that it wasn't the cable, rather it was the connector inside the laptop itself. And so, for the last several months I have been using my Acer on battery and plugging it in when not in use while ensuring the orange charge light was on. Do so I ensured that my laptop was in a stable place - such as on a table - so the connect was consistent. It was difficult workwise and especially when I had several client meetings back-to-back as there was ofttimes not enough power even when starting with a fully charged battery. In such cases I had to risk plugging it in but not daring to move. Still I experienced some hard crashes. In the meantime I persisted in trying to get my HP up and running again - no success. 

Then on Wednesday, I couldn't get the battery charge light on at all and I was literally racing my battery power to get my Kevin Bacon article out before finally taking my computer to be repaired. Fortunately, I was able to pick it up in the afternoon yesterday, but not before missing the opportunity to post anything yesterday.

And so that is why there was no post yesterday!

In hindsight I should have probably followed MamaRah's example, but not with buying an Acer, but by swapping the hard drive on the Lenovo which was the most gorgeous laptop I ever owned even if she was a bit slow.

I am sure at least one person (and if you are reading this you know who you are lol) will say that I should have bought an Apple machine rather than several Windows laptops and in this case my friend you may well be right apart from my stubborn refusal to give anything to Steve Jobs' legacy.

As always stay safe and well my friends and I hope you have better look with your laptops!