Grrr. My new laptop died this morning. I was in the middle of transitioning everything to that laptop so the desktop could be Rosemary's computer. Then this morning, suddenly, the unit would no longer start. At all. I'm going to have to try to figure out how to get it going again.
The reason I'm sharing my tale of woe with you? I have several days' worth of email on that beast. There are quite a few of you who have sent me requests for help, information on setting up new Movable Type blogs (I think there are at least two of you in that camp, John Weidner and one other I think), there was at least one blogger who had an interesting proposal I hadn't fully read or digested yet (Defective Yeti) and quite a few others whose mail I had barely glanced at.
So: if you sent me an email recently and did not receive a response, please give me another day or two and, if you still get no response, please re-send, because it means Mr. Laptop isn't coming back to life and neither is your mail.
(Grrrr. Computers are evil. No one should use them.)
Not use them? But then what would us geeks do for a living?! Go back to nature or something?
Mr. Esmay, I feel your pain! Hope you manage to get that laptop working again. There's no feeling quite like the feeling of having a computer go south on you all of a sudden. I once had an old Leading Edge Model D (8088 processor, 7.16 MHz "turbo speed," green Hercules monochrome monitor) suddenly go out on me, with five months' worth of unbacked-up work on the 42-meg Seagate hard drive. Tried to get it running again, no luck. Since I was utterly indigent, at that time and for a couple of years thereafter, I never did get around to even retrieving the data off the hard drive.
By an astonishing piece of synchronicity, I drop by and come upon this new post of yours just as I finish my regular data backup from my (now four-years-old) laptop onto Zip™ disks.
And you say this is your new laptop? Well, hopefully covered under warranty then. But still, it's a pain in the ass.
Had two -- count em, two -- hard drives go bad on me within 60 days of each other last spring. Bad craziness.
I feel your pain, my good friend.
That is always the worst feeling in the world when your laptop doesn't start up. I had that happen to me a couple of times; luckily it wasn't bad hardware just bad power management drivers. Try removing the battery to make sure it is not in power-save hell. If you don't even see the BIOS start-up messages that could be the culprit since a bad hard drive would give you the "no hard disk found" message most of the time.
Once I got my heart to beat again after my laptop recovered I of course made it a point to perform a full backup. Good Luck!
Backups, man, backups. There are no substitutes. As you know, I backup daily. Retrospect can be had for about $80 these days, and one copy will backup up to three machines (the machine it's running on, plus two "client" machines over the network).
I also configure my mail client to leave messages on the server for a few days, so I can still get to them through a Web mail client if for some reason I'm without a computer for a few days.
Best of luck getting it back up and running.
And to top it all off, I KNOW that when the thing wouldn't fire up, you thought to yourself "I wish I had bought a Mac".
Sure, Gary: then he'd have a $3,000 doorstop instead of a $900 or $1,200 one. Heh.
Actually, you can get a new iBook (the nifty all white job) for under a thousand now, and the super spiffy new PowerBook for about $1500 (the neat 12" version). But be aware: unlike many of the Windows notebooks (I use a Dell when I'm not at my desk, which sports an iMac), they will stop only very small doors.