Why buy a new computer when ...

This post is also to be found on the ICT Blog of www.osltraining.co.uk

... your old one is perfectly good?

That self same daughter I mentioned in the previous post told me on arrival that she had bought a new laptop at Christmas because her old one was running so slowly. I asked her to show me what she meant and she was right ... it really was running horrifically slowly. Word took ages to open, web browsers took an age, opening windows explorer was a nightmare. I took at look for viruses and spyware and so on but found nothing.

I took at look at all the services that were running and didn't see much to worry about.

So I thought I'd tidy away all of the software that daughter Fran no longer used. Nothing outrageous and nothing apparently evil.

After an hour and a half or so, however, I handed the computer to Fran to ask her to try to do again what she used to to ... open Word ... she did and found it was now back to the way it was.

You can guess what I said next! Why buy a new machine when a bit of TLC would have (and did) solve the problems?

Here's a funny thing: as I was about to hand over the laptop to Fran I asked her if the battery was OK because I wanted to pull out the power cable to hand it over. She said, yes, as far as she knew it was fine. So I pulled out the cable and ... INSTANT BLACK SCREEN ... followed by howls of laughter from the pair of us!! I checked and found that whilst the battery was 97% charged, it had not been seated properly in its housing.

Mirth, merriment and a newly invigorated laptop computer.

DW