Laptops Are Not Indestructable
I feel people’s pain a lot when it comes to computer problems. Most days, I take it for granted that I happen to be technically inclined. Even when I am using a machine that I have never used or seen before, I am not afraid to just dive in there and attempt to figure out how to make it work. I have always been that way. But, after this weekend and after talking on the phone with a friend a few minutes ago, I was reminded that most people really are at the mercy of their personal computers. I was attending a party this weekend when a good friend of my in-laws, and a super nice person, told me that she wanted to pay me to do some consulting. I told her there was no need to pay me and asked her what she needed help with. She told me that she wanted to pay me to make her labels for her family Christmas card. I had to really try hard not to laugh out loud and in her face….because she was dead serious. To her, this was a monumental task. To me, it was less than monkey work. I would consider “building a website” monkey work that any jackass could do. This wasn’t even on the map.
So, I paused, asked her what program she had her contacts in. She told me that she didn’t have them in the computer yet, they were all on paper. I told her that she was really capable of doing this herself and that I would be happy to walk her through mail merging them in Word or something after she had all of the contacts put into digital format. She came back by telling me that this was part of what she wanted to pay me to do. Sigh. If I were 10 years old, this would be a great way to make a couple of bucks. At 35, it was bordering on insulting, and that is probably because this is one of the nicest people that I have met via my wife’s family. It was really funny. It ended with me telling her that Kinko’s could probably do this for her very quickly and inexpensively.
But, back to the laptop issue. Ken just called and told me that he was getting a message on his laptop screen saying, “Operating system not found.” He, like me, gets pretty frustrated pretty quickly with things sometimes. Often, in his case, it is due to his computer(s). This is not a particularly good message, indicating that there could simply be a problem with the MBR (Master Boot Record) on the drive, or worse, his drive could be smoked. I told him that we probably had a 99% chance recovering the data on the drive regardless of the situation. But, that it is not something we are going to be able to just flip a switch and fix. He was saying things like, “Yeah, but I need to use this thing today / right now.” While I can understand his frustration, I seldom understand why people get so pissed off about things like this frequently, yet don’t have any backups or duplication of their data. If the data is mission critical and it updates daily then you better replicate it or back it up daily. Then, the worst case is that you lose a one day’s work. But, more than anything is the legions of people that use their laptops as their main computer…with no backups. Regardless of the form factor the computer comes in, a laptop is still a piece of sensitive electronics. Micro electronic devices don’t like to be banged around. Translation, don’t use your laptop as your main data center of your critical information, unless you are super-dilligent about backing that data up daily. And, even then, I would not choose to do it that way unless I absolutely had to. There are too many options these days to remotely log into your main machine at the office or at home to have to deal with nonsense like this. But, for whatever reason, people just don’t want to believe that their computer is going to take a dump. So, do yourself a favor if you are one of these people:
- Back up your data daily
- Learn to use the “Briefcase” if you use Windows to sync your data between your laptop and your main computer
- Check into technologies like Remote Desktop
- Back up your data daily
[tags]Computers, Data, Backup, Drive Failure, MBR[/tags]
