The push over the edge

It finally happened......

I got back late from a long weekend, flipped open my laptop and proceeded to check my mail. Its startup was strange, first the CPU fan came on hard, no post beep and none of the normal startup light sequences. Hmmm... taking a deep breath, I held the on button until it shut down and tried it again.

This time the startup proceeded normally, I got to log into Windows XP and started Outlook. As soon as Outlook loaded the display went crazy, and all I could see was multicolored vertical lines. I played with it some more (holding my breath) but results were poor.

It finally happened, my 3 year old Gateway Laptop was toast.

This thing served me well, it goes everywhere with me, and although it has suffered no abuse, it's life has not been cushy. The folks at Gateway were nice on the phone, for a reasonable cost they are replacing the motherboard in the unit, and will get it back to me sometime in the next 10-15 business days....... yikes....

I had foreseen this event happening, and bought a new desktop for Christmas to handle Quickbooks and other crucial parts of my business, so luckily I had a machine. I was also able to pick up a small 2.5” drive housing that I could put the Laptop's hard drive in while the system was repaired, so my data was available to me. But what about applications ?

Well applications are the problem aren't they. They tend to add the most expense to any computer system these days, and so on the new desktop I had opted out of the expensive Microsoft Office Suite, and had been using Open Office whenever I needed to touch a spreadsheet or word processing document. Which to this point was rare. But so far I have produced a few documents and spreadsheets this week, and have exchanged them with clients without incident.

Probably the thorniest issue I had to work through was E-mail. Having used Outlook exclusively for the last 3 years I had a considerable about of important stuff in Outlook pst files. Well Thunderbird to the rescue (sort of)........

Next post I'll cover my Outlook -> Thunderbird issues and solutions. And will continue to post about my experiences with Open Office as my time w/o MS Office continues.

Till next time:
Sean Riley
President, DogRiley