As I had no hope of reviving my laptop on my own, I took my laptop to Futureshop to see if they can use their equipment to extract the data out of the hard drive. Turns out the hard drive itself is damaged, and even getting the data out of the thing will take overnight. So I was forced to make a quick decision on another laptop as i desperately need one.

Here’s how the problem occurred most recently - Windows Vista is not quite the most stable thing you can imagine, and on every sleep-wake cycle due to shutting the laptop lid, it takes a very long time to load. On Wednesday I was using my laptop on the road, and as I opened it, it was quite slow to come back up to speed. Anyhow, I used it with Firefox (which by the way has glitches while running on Vista) to browse some pages, and even though I had no other major applications running (such as Dreamweaver or Photoshop) it just decided to do a full out crash. The mouse pointer stopped moving altogether. So I had to press the power button to do a force re-boot.

It didn’t quite boot. I kept getting either a black screen, or a flashing blue-screen-of-death before it went into a re-start on its own. The furthest I would get to was the green loading bar graphic, and then that was it.

My friend has finally convinced me, again, to try out a Mac, as they are much more stable, and won’t have the crashing issues, and I won’t have to do the re-install-the-OS routine every few months to keep it running fast and new (I’ve been doing that always with my Window XP/Vista laptops).

Last time I tried out a Macbook Pro, it didn’t work out so well as I got very frustrated with the whole new interface that was not as technical as I am used to.  This time, however, with the new release of the Leopard, which carries Bootcamp as part of its core to allow running Windows on the Macbook, I hope to have better results.

With the data recovery cost, the extended warranty (after having 2 major laptop problems in less than 2 years, I was inclined to get it), the data extraction fee at a discount, my tab at Futureshop came to almost $3,000 today.

It was a painful two days being without my data or a laptop. Right now I am writing this post on my shiny new Macbook Pro 15.4 with the 2.2 ghz Intel Duo Core and 2Gb of RAM, along with an N-class wireless adapter, topped off by an illuminated keyboard underneath the glossy LED screen.

Wish me luck.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 2:43 am and is filed under Gadgets and Electronics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.