Not Again!

You may have noticed that I missed a few blog entries. It was not intentional. It was because of a forced priority change resulting from some messages I began to receive on my laptop that produced a change of feeling inside me. They were messages that related to a hard drive failure. I grabbed my portable hard drive and prayed for enough time to get a clean current backup of all my data, which God granted.

Now before me was a decision, like I had one year ago, when another laptop I owned ended up with a blank screen that had to be replaced. I kept that one going for awhile by attaching an external monitor to it, which allowed me time to order a new laptop, transfer data to it, reload old software, and get everything working again. When I got back from China I had time to get it fixed at the vender’s expense. That laptop is currently being used by Jiajing and Connie when needed.

I thought about what to do and talked to the Lord about it and decided that my best choice was to get another new laptop and pray for one that was more reliable. I went online to research my possibilities in a price range that was workable for me. I found one and printed out the specifications and planned a trip down toward Dallas to a very large computer store to see what they had that would match my specks. If they had something I could bring it home and get started on the data/software rebuild, which takes more time than one would think.

I walked into the store and got a knowledgeable sale person to help look. We found four that were very close to what I wanted and all at the same price. I narrowed it down to one and noticed that it was one third less than the online price and include service at the service department within the store, not a phone call with someone in India and then have to ship it to some place in the US. I was very pleased with the experience and walked out of the store with my third laptop in three years. What happened to being reliable? It is true that I carry these laptops in my backpack around China. They do get more than normal abuse.

I got it home and went to work. I loaded the backed up data and then started to install all the software that was needed. That is what takes time. All the good software have product codes that have to be entered and to run them you have to register that number again and when you do I found in one case that the software stopped working on the old laptop. One piece of software wouldn’t install because it was licensed to the old laptop. I had to call the company and convince them to transfer the license to my new laptop.

Since the laptop came with Windows 7 installed and since it is a new release there were some driver issues I had to resolve. One proved to be very interesting. I have a rather large laser color page printer that needed a driver. I went to their site and downloaded what I needed, but I couldn’t install it. I tried everything I could think of and finally called the company for some help. The service tech was a friendly English speaking person. We connected quickly and went to work. After about an hour of downloads and installs of various drivers we finally verified that the company had a defective print driver. That means I was the first person to find and report the problem, resulting in a request for a fix to the driver. It will take several days for that request to work through channels. I kind of enjoyed being part of a software fix. The service tech made a definite point to thank me for my good and understanding attitude. Having you find the problem may save us from receiving calls from others who are impatient and make our job difficult.

In the meantime I need to print my China newsletter. I will have to copy the file to another computer in the office that is connected to the printer and print it from there. That will be ok as long as the printing doesn’t require any data from a database file on my laptop.

There is more I could share, but that is more than enough to let you know why there were no blog entries for almost a week. Now that I am almost done setting up this laptop, my next project is to call the vender of the bad laptop and get it fixed and then give it to Connie for her personal laptop. I think she would like to take it to Arizona with her when she goes to visit for two months to care for our two grandchildren there this summer.