Laptop meets liquid

I had a business trip to the west country last week and did something really stupid on the way back.  I accidentally knocked over a bottle of water and my computer got wet.

It killed it dead of course.

It was difficult to come to terms with to start with, I kept trying to start it up, but nothing happened.  But surely if I tried one more time ….

We are lucky in Norwich in that we have an Apple store, so on Friday, the day after I got back, I made an appointment with the ‘Genius Bar‘.  But the nice Apple man couldn’t get it to start either.  “We had better get it examined” he told me, getting me to sign a piece of paper, “We’ll contact you as soon as we have finished”.

Living without the laptop

Life was very odd, without my Macbook.  Strange and lonely.  I have the office PC of course, but the Macbook is where I do most of my writing, read blogs, visit forums, surf the internet, and twitter.  It was a bit like having lost an arm.

The family were not sympathetic.  “You can talk to us now” said my teenage son gleefully, despite the fact that he spends most of his time staring into his Dell Studio laptop and frequently fails to answer us when we speak to him.

My husband has never liked the laptop (“that white thing”) taking my attention away from him, and invariably glares at me when the startup Bongg goes off.  No sympathy there then.

Repair or replace?

The estimate for the repair bill came through, as £701.  Yikes!  Apparently practically every part in the machine needed to be replaced.

“How much would a replacement laptop cost?” I asked.  The answer was £849 plus £79 to transfer to the data over.  So for an extra £200 odd I could have a new machine.  One with twice the RAM, a bigger hard drive, improved performance …

Happily the damage was covered by insurance subject to a £100 excess, so effectively I could have a new machine with all my data  transferred over for just over £300.  And I would not have to wait for the parts to arrive and my machine to be repaired.  It was not the time I would have chosen for a computer upgrade, but there was no question which option I would choose.  The only worry was whether my data had survived the water damage.

So Wednesday I went in and paid them, and yesterday and I collected my new machine.  Its great!

The old and the new

The nice Apple people were able to recover the data and it had all been copied over and set up for me.  So on opening the machine up it was just like having my old laptop back.  All the software I had downloaded from the internet was there, all my bookmarks, the saved passwords for web-sites.  Even the tabs on Firefox were still open.  Just like before.

But the machine is so much better.  The screen is much brighter, its like its been through the wash (which is saying something as the old screen was pretty nice).  It seems to work faster.  And the computer itself is nicer.

One thing in particular I like is that there is a shiny texture on the top but a more matt texture on the bottom, so when I am carrying it, it is much easier to set it down the right way up.  With the old machine I was always having to turn it over before opening.  Very clever.

Also the £79 I paid for the data transfer entitles me to get some training at the Apple Store.  Its called Apple One to One.  I can see that being very useful.

So not really a disaster at all, now its all over.  But I am making sure that this machine is kept well away from any liquid!