I have not been the only Crawley blogger to experience technical difficulties. Shortly before I went off air, Danivon had his own problems. (He is now back with with some nice meaty posts about the local hospital, Cameron's worker-hostile policies and waste in the NHS while I still prattle on about cycle paths and Primeval)
His problems got me thinking about laptops generally. Basically he had a dead screen, but as a result lost aeverything on his hard drive. When I had a motherboard failure on my desktop last year I was able to incorporate my old hard drive, memory, monitor and other bits and pieces into the new desktop quite happily. I think that is one of the causes of my dislike of laptops – the idea of having all your eggs in one basket and losing data just because of a broken screen. (OK – it would have been restorable but only with expensive specialised assistance)
Where my mind wandered was to the comparison between computers and hi-fi. One of the practical arguments for having hi-fi separates was that you could not only upgrade individual components but if anything ever broke you would only have to replace that component. Owners of hi-fi separates could get quite snobby about anyone having an all-in-one music centre where if the tape deck went you would have to discard a working amp, CD deck, tuner and speakers instead of just replacing the tape deck. (Being the proud owner of a Linn Sondek LP12 I know all about looking down on cheap stereos 🙂 even if the LP12 is just gathering dust in a cupboard now)
The same sort of practical argument seems to apply to computers, but the irony is that plenty of owners of top-end hi-fi separates probably have laptops instead of desktops.
All of that would probably have made more sense had I been able to write it when the thoughts occurred to me…
You can upgrade memory and hard drive in a laptop. But yes, screens are a big problem.
What is surprising is how many people dispose of PCs that go wrong. I know someone who bought a new PC because his stopped booting. He’d got a virus, and it wiped out the hard drive. He could have simply re-installed it, or hired a tech for £50 to do it for him.
Ha!
That reminds me of how an old friend of mine got her stereo: a Technics stack which was pretty good at the time.
An old lady was selling it through the small ads. It was a present from her children which she didn’t really want and had never worked at all, hence the ridiculously cheap price. (About £50 for something worth more than £500 at the time and never used)
When she was dismantling it all with her friends to take it away, they realised that the speakers were not plugged in…