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The £500 Coffee Coaster

14 June 2015

On no! Panic! Disaster! My laptop has just paused fatally in the middle of a piece of work, locked all the programmes and then swan dived into the blue screen of death.

Alas poor Vaio, I knew him, Microsoft. As Shakespeare would have said when his machine mucked up a few choice lines of Hamlet…

It’s now a couple of weeks later and my Vaio is back from laptop hospital and up and running again. All it needed was a new hard drive, complete data swap, reload the programs, sort Outlook and to reset everything that’s not nailed down. Phew!

Interestingly the old hard drive was a Sony upgrade. A sexy solid state of 256 big gigabytes. £500 worth of yummy technology. And it never really worked properly and kicked up a blue screen at least once a month.

The hard drive is now only fit to be a coffee coaster, so that’s what it is doing with itself. So far it’s not crashed yet, but I remain wary.

The new hard drive with the same spec cost an eye watering £75. My eyes watered at the thought of spending too much to begin with on something that promised extra reliability and never delivered that.

The moral of this story is twofold. Firstly that price is not always an indicator of quality. Sony charged more and delivered less and have now left the laptop market completely.

Secondly when my laptop crashed I had a moment of panic and then remembered that all my client files are in dropbox so were fully backed up and instantly available with my iPad. Thank heavens for that!

This week think about whether your data is all backed up and what you would do if your PC died on you? I’m not a huge Apple Acolyte and yet the iPad was a brilliant stand in. What would you use if you had a disaster?

I now have a happy laptop and a luxury coffee coaster. If only I drank coffee! Green tea for me, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.

Next week: #NorwichHour