Friday 5th October

I have before suffered the dread of the blue screen and the physical dump of memory.  I have before suffered glitches in loading Windows, when the screen gets to a certain point and no further, and have learnt to open it in safe mode.  As a result of these and the fact that you just cannot afford to lose all your data I now have everything backed up in the clouds by Synchplicity, though how you would ever retrieve it is a mystery I have yet to understand.  Added to these I have in the past had my laptop stolen and tipped a cup of coffee over one too, so in a way I should be used to these little incidents.

Yesterday I took the laptop out of my bag as usual and attached the cable and pressed the on/off button.

Nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  Not even a glimmer of life, no little green led light indicating that the power was on.  Of course I checked the plug and tried it in a different socket, but still nothing.  I hadn’t been using it on battery, so that should have at least kicked in.  I took the battery out and tried to start it just with a cable, then with the battery and no cable at all.  Still nothing.  I rang a couple of people, who had never heard of such a thing.

I do have a spare laptop, but the thought of the hassle of downloading Sage, and Payroll and then all the data really depressed me.  I have done this before and it takes forever, and there is always something you miss along the way.

I went to bed a bit pissed off, and in that stupid way I just couldn’t switch my brain off. After half an hour of sleep evasion I decided to take it to a PCWorld in the morning, it might just be the cable or the battery faulty.  I came down to use the internet on the PC to find the nearest branch and just tried the laptop again.

It worked.  And has done since.  I can only hope and pray it continues.  Maybe the battery was faulty, and is now okay.  Who knows.  As every computer expert will tell you. “Have you tried switching it off and on again?”