A nice warm lap!

Looking back on yesterday's post it all sounded a bit negative, I'm sorry it was actually not that bad, but it is a bad time of year to be a gardener!

A few months ago, well actually quite a few months ago I did the very silly thing of spilling some coffee on my laptop keyboard. I mopped up what I could and then left the rest to dry, when it hadn't seemed to dry properly I did the even sillier thing of using a hair dryer on it. Well of course I melted a couple of the keys and it hasn't been the same since.   I knew I had to get it fixed, but couldn't face the inconvenience of being without it or the possible expense.   Yesterday I reached breaking point and just couldn't put up with it any more, so took it over to my good friends at Computer Solutions for a repair.   It seems that the repair will be neither as long or as expensive as I feared, I await the phone call..............

The other good news is that in the course of my move I discovered that I still had my previous laptop, only rep[laced as it had grown very tired and slow with all the data I had on it.   With the data cleared off and copied onto the new machine it was a bit better but still slow.   Well after carrying out a lot of maintenance, clearing off unwanted files, cleaning up the registry and defraging the hard disk it now works fine for e-mail and internet.

So I'm not totally cut off, but I am cut off from all my business records and photos.

I am also struck by the much higher quality of my old machine, when this Dell Inspiron started to grind very slowly I got a new Acer. I had an Acer before and was very impressed by the quality of the machine, the case, keyboard and hinges were all of an obvious high quality. Such a shame that I can't say the same of the new one! At some point they clearly came to the same conclusion as Peugeot and stopped making a quality product and just churned out any old junk that "would do".   It is now going to be a bit of a pain to go back to the Acer keyboard after getting used to the old Dell again.   The lesson, next time I buy a Computer I will be giving it a "test drive" first!