Tuesday 13th September

Last Monday I suffered a catastrophe.  The laptop froze, in fact it had been happening fairly regularly, but as usual I had simply ignored it and restarted the thing.  This time it kept freezing and then Sage, my Accounts package wouldn’t open at all.  I closed the laptop down.  Tried restarting – again nothing was working.  Took the battery out and put it back in and restarted – again nothing.  Frustration, annoyance.  I decided to seek help.  I tool the laptop to Andy, our local computer man.  He was just finishing for the day.  On Tuesday he told me the machine had a virus, but also he thought that Windows 7 hadn’t been loaded correctly and hadn’t been receiving updates, some of which were improvements to the anti-virus.  He said the only option was to back-up all the data and re-install Windows 7.

I agreed, but with the usual trepidation, worrying that data might get lost or that the machine itself might never work again.  It has taken a whole week to sort out but today I got the thing back and had to download Sage and printer drivers and a whole week of e-mails and catch up on everything.  It is all done now.  Phew.  All seems okay.

But I have had a week away from my laptop.  Sometimes I feel I am handcuffed to the thing.  And it has been strangely liberating.  No daily blog to do, no e-mails to check, no facebook to look at, no handcuffs in fact.  So.  Am I going to change my behaviour.  Probably not.  But I might try….