Another laptop bites the dust

Can you believe it?

My 16 month old Lenovo IdeaPad laptop died!  My previous one (an Asus) lasted just a tad longer, just over 18 months, the one before that (a Toshiba) I had for 5 years.  I’m not doing really well since the trusty Toshiba, am I?

These last two have just suddenly ground to a halt, froze and then when I tried to reboot, they would not start up again.  It really makes me wonder what I’m doing to kill them?  I don’t play games, I blog, run speadsheets, research through lots of open tabs in browsers and edit a video once in a blue moon.

When my Toshiba and the Asus packed up I was a b s o l u t e l y distraught!  I was freaking out for all the data that I had lost; All those photos and videos.  Documents are important, but can be recreated. The memories held in the photos and videos are irreplaceable.

I was crap at backing up, with never having the right cable for the correct external hard disk drive to do the back up… if I’m honest, despite the distress of the loss of data I still am rubbish.

I have, however, learnt my lesson:  I know I won’t be backing up often enough, so I keep very little data on my laptop that needs backing up.

Although I have no idea of what really is lost this time on my IdeaPad, I’m pretty sure there isn’t much:

You see, the IdeaPad came with Office 365 trial installed, with the monthly fee of just £5 it seemed a no-brainer to carry on after the trial period.  The main draw for me was the ability to install the Office suite on 5 other devices, which means I can make sure that my parents and in-laws have the most up-to-date versions.  This helps us share documents with them, help them create documents- invites, letters, etc.

Microsoft recently announced that they are upping their cloud storage limits for 365 customers: OneDrive’s limit is …wait for it…unlimited!

My phone automatically backs up to my OneDrive the moment it hits a WiFi hotspot, as does Dadonthebrink’s iPhone.  So pictures taken with it are already safe.  Which, if I’m honest are 90% of the pictures we take at the moment. In fact, the pictures were taking up most of the storage before the limits were removed.

With the announcement about the increase in storage for customers I made sure I moved even more onto OneDrive.

So, for now, I’m living in oblivious ignorance about what I may have forgotten to move over.

As I type, I’m using the family laptop a Lenovo Yoga, which thanks to the way Microsoft works, is like logging onto my own laptop.  The only thing I notice is the slightly slower performance, due to the specs of this laptop.

So away I go, as if a £500+ laptop had not just given up on me.

… that was 2 months ago.

(I wrote the blog post, but didn’t publish it.  Maybe for fear of jinxing it. Don’t know!)

My old laptop, Lenovo IdeaPad, is back and running.  Repaired.

My friend who took it apart and got it going again could not find any obvious fault with it. Bizarre!

All I can say is, I am grateful for the automatic back ups.

I have swapped back to my IdeaPad as if it was only yesterday I used it last.  All my latest files, with all the work from the past 2 months are at my finger tips.

Over the past month, as I was tearing my hair out at how slow the Lenovo Yoga was, I kept finding all the files I needed to pick up projects where I had left off on my IdeaPad.  It was brilliant to have that continuity.

The past months have taught me how important it is to have sync settings properly working and enabled.

What would you loose if your laptop’s hard drive ground to a halt tomorrow?

Image Credit: Gibeault on DeviantArt