Adventures in Laptopping

When I began my career as a full-time freelancer last fall, I knew I'd need a good laptop. I thought about making the giant leap to one of these:




After working in tech support for 13 years, supporting Windows, it seemed the wrong thing to do. Windows was safe. I understood Windows. But there was one thing I didn't count on...



I knew I needed something reliable, so I researched and researched. One name that stood out was Sony Vaio. The laptop had a good reputation in the industry. This is my beautiful laptop.



Pretty, isn't it? What if I told you the hard drive has crashed seven times since August? Still pretty?



The good news is, there's an assist button. One push and you can reload everything in less than a half an hour. I have it down to a routine now. The bad news? I had to give up Carbonite as a backup and just keep everything on a USB drive that I back up to my hard drive, which will fail in a month or so.




There are 200 pages of complaints on Sony's website, but mostly those complaints are a bunch of whining about small things. Nobody has the problems I have. But then...how many of them work on their laptops all day, every day?



Lesson? Don't buy a new PC within a year of a new operating system being released.




But the biggest lesson of all?




How do you handle computer problems?