[My Thinkpad X60S. Salvaged by Geeks and zipping again. Photo by Shel]
I get kidded a lot about the tech problems I so often seem to have. Last week I was at TC 40 and was the only person in the front two rows who could not get on my computer. The trouble is I am not alone in what goes wrong for me. In fact, I am among millions of people who work on Windows-based machines, who are not tech professionals and do not have IT support to tweak their machines.
It's worse for me than it may be for you, because I move around a lot with an ultralight computer and Windows does not seem to like me connecting to the Internet from several places every day.
About a year after I buy a computer it starts developing goofy anomalies. This time it began in May, when my desktop photo went don making my background the Thinkpad Time Zone default. Over the next few months, I developed a list of 30 anomalies, some of which came and went, some of which stayed. The worst was a persistent freeze up of my Outlook mail client, followed by a wait of several minutes to rebuild my personal folder.
In the end, I went to the Geek Squad counter at Good guys. I had them do a clean wipe and rebuild of my hard disk. Now I need to personalize everything again. Firefox does not recall any sites I have visited, nor does Outlook recall who I've previously emailed.
Other than that my Thinkpad zips and sings like a new computer and I am a happy camper. I tossed in an extra Gig of DRAM and was out of the store for $450. Much cheaper than a new PC (or MAC). And if I had bought a new computer, it probably would have cost $150 anyway, to port my data from old to new computer.
With the money, I've saved, I'll probably buy a video camera, because the webcam I'm using to blog is severely limited. The big fear is that Thinkpads are really not built for multimedia and my growing passion for video may force me into a Mac in the end after all.
I write this, because the Geeks confirmed to me that, most people with Windows based machines, particularly laptops need to do what I just did, but perhaps not as frequently. If you have a laptop, the average is 18 months. If you have a desktop, on the average it's once every two years.
