We've been offline as far as the blog is concerned for a few months as the laptop I normally write on has been a bit broken. It was fatally killed to death when it came into contact with my son's toy magnets.It wouldn't boot up and muttered something about a damaged OS system, so I'm guessing the magnets must have corrupted the permanent memory. I took it to a local repair shop and they quoted £150+ to install a new hard-drive and reload the software. With other expenses on the horizon, and still recovering from a new roof, I politely declined and left the laptop gathering dust.
We have a desktop in the upstairs study for essential usage but doing recreational writing is a bit lonely up there, especially as I spend all day staring at a desktop at work, I don't really like barricading myself away up there in the evenings. Anyway having had a few spare moments this week I decided to see if I couldn't have a go at fixing it, so I googled the fault on another working computer (okay its an iPad - so shoot me!) and managed to delve around in the laptop's innards. Without boring you further I managed to kick-off some level-9 diagnostic repair cycle and lo and behold - it's talking to me again.
Obviously I've lost personal stuff off it, but we always backed up anyway (I did learn something at work!), and just needed to download browsers, drivers and some freebie anti-virus (our original McAfee version is out of date and won't load properly - it tells me after running for 90 minutes....), so now we are up and running again.
It almost feels as if we have a new toy. I feel pleased we managed to repair it ourselves rather than get the pros in or even chuck it and buy a new one. I wonder if the repair shop was yanking my chain or just guessing without actually looking at it, but I'm sure even if they had done what I'd done they's still charge about £50 for the pleasure.
On another positive home finance front I recorded the gas and electricity meter readings with the utility companies for the first time since January, and although the leccy is about £40 in debt (might be something to do with all those computers, Ed.) the gas is £450 in credit!!!
I'm going to ask for that back, it would've bought a new laptop. Which we don't need now. So that's all good.
