Thursday afternoon, my laptop for work started acting funny. I didn’t find it amusing. Friday, on a deadline, I was dismayed as it turned off, without warning, in the middle of my work. I got it to reboot long enough to do two things that absolutely had to happen. Then, I got the Blue Screen of Death. A call to IT walked me through more reboots and a dire pronouncement, “Ma’am, this is a very serious problem.”
I didn’t know that Blue Screen of Death was an official IT term. Now I know.
Geek Squad ran a $59 diagnostic. I dropped off the laptop about 5 p.m. on Friday and they called with the diagnosis by 10 a.m. the next morning. Now THAT’S good service! Unfortunately, the news was bad, as in, bad hard drive. Kaput. Kaplooie.
I’ve joined the hundreds of thousands of fellow bloggers and laptop-dependent folks who have had computer failure and gone through withdrawals as my laptop is on its merry way to the IT hospital. I’m lucky, I have a backup laptop on which to work this week but it’s not the same.
I know many of you will say, “Get a Mac!” but that’s unfortunately not an option. What’s the best laptop (lightweight yet durable) out there?
I’m telling you, get an IBM ThinkPad.
You have my deepest sympathy. I can’t imagine living without my computers!
Marijean, so sorry to hear your trauma. Laptop death just plain sucks.
You asked for lightweight recommendations…? I cannot tell you how much I LOVE my Dell Latitude D430. I had a smallish one before (the D400) and went tinier last fall. It has the footprint of a piece of paper, weighs about 3 lbs and is less than an inch thick. Fits into ANY kind of tote. No more ugly laptop bags! And no more aching shoulder! I know you travel a lot…check it out.
Macs can run Windows, if that’s the issue.
My Mac hard drive crashed three weeks ago, my colleagues Mac hard drive crashed this week, and my friend’s crashed earlier in the year. None of us were able to retrieve anything. They have their issues.
My husband, who builds our computers from scratch (kind of like making pie), says Dell–the best/newest you can afford. When we bought our laptop, since he couldn’t make it, he spent hours researching them and that was the verdict. He has an IBM ThinkPad supplied by his employer (he, too, works from home), but I notice it generally sits idle while I fight for our personal laptop. Since he is the IT guru of our crowd, we get that question a lot, and Dell is always the reply I hear.
Changing computers is the biggest pain in the world. (I had to do in in January and I swear it took a month to get it re-loaded and ready to go again.)
D-