Death of A Laptop

As blog followers will have realised, we have been off-line for a few months. This was due to the collapse and inevitable death of my Vaio laptop.

I say inevitable, because although the Vaio  is a serious bit of kit and very reliable, over the past 6 years that laptop has gone above and beyond in terms of the amount of sheer hard work it has had to perform. It has helped me churn out thousands of articles, enabled me to surf the net, download all kinds of files, load and run umpteen programmes – some of which were very chunky monkeys – and has allowed me to stay in touch with my family and friends, cyber and otherwise.

Eventually, component failure took its toll, and by the end my laptop was excruciatingly slow and unable to perform all  its functions, so the hunt for a replacement began…

I don’t know how many of my readers are living in foreign climes, but hunting for a new PC or laptop in a foreign land is a tricky business. Although computers run in English, generally speaking, operating sytems tend to be in the language of the country in which you buy. This is fine if you are a linguistic genius, but not good if you are the average user., as even the most basic functions are hard to decipher unless you can locate the language bar and change the default langugae, and even then some programmes will still be in (our case) Cyrillic.

We happened to be in Carrefour in Bourgas – not the place you would automatically look for a computer – but there was a special offer on in their electronics department, and a helpful English speaking staff member, who explained all the features of the PC on offer. It came with a 19 inch Phillips monitor, an impressively sized processor, techno looking black tower with DVD/CD drive and the keyboard and mouse. All this for the princely sum of 630 LEVA (about £300) AND Mr Helpful downloaded an authorised version of XP Professional in English, for a further 30LEV. We were so excited we bought a similary glossy Epson colour scanner/printer/photocopier for another 100LEV. We also recommended this purchase to friends who were searching for a replacement PC.

Happily, the PC is great – I hadn’t realised just how slow my Vaio was till I plugged in this sparkly new PC. It was like riding a pushbike up a hill with the brakes on in the latter days of my laptop’s life, the PC, by contrast, is like driving a gleaming new Ferrari! I switch on – and hey presto – I have a screen – just like that – immediately! No waiting, no problems with programmes opening or downloads. Delightful.

Nevertheless, I miss my Vaio. We shared a lot over that 6 years, it has travelled all over the place with me, and has paid its way again and again. It had a nice soft keyboard (my new keyboard is hard and the “e” doesn’t always “take”) and as knackered as my old mouse is to look at it still works just fine, so I binned the shiny new one after 5 minutes as it just didn’t feel right in my hand!

Since wireless internet is pretty much in the fledgling stages here in Bulgaria, having a static PC instead of a portable laptop is not really an issue and wireless – when you can get it – is intermittent and unreliable, so that’s fine. What I have had to invest in is a battery back up and surge protector because of the power surges and cuts we experience here, and I made Firefox my browser, as it automatically saves your last page if you are cut off suddenly. With a laptop you already have a battery and that is something I failed to think about till the first surge happened, but now I am prepared!

So here I  am, back in the fray, and over the next few days I will attempt to bring the blog up to date. The Vaio meanwhile is sitting dustily in its case as I will get it overhauled as a back up., and one day I will buy another one – they really are that good – but I’ll wait till wireless is freely available here, which means I’ve got plenty of time to save…. lol!