Farewell Lappy

I'm back from France, my parents are back in the UK and Matt's parents are back in Texas so this would seem like the ideal time to update my blog with all the pictures and stories from the last month. My computer however, had other ideas.

The week before I went to France I decided to download some new podcasts, charge my ipod and perhaps if time, update the blog. The battery on my laptop had failed to charge for a long time so I have had to use it with the charger always plugged in. That was never really a big deal as despite it being 6 years old this was the only ailment it had.

However, this time I plugged lappy in I got nothing except the light on the charger. No light on the laptop and no power on. After trying all the things I could think of (i.e. taking out the battery, wiggling the cord, blowing any dust out of the connection) I took lappy to the computer doctor.

It wasn't quite this extreme but the effect was the same!

The diagnosis was not good. Essentially it would cost me a lot to figure out what exactly was wrong and then it might not even be fixable (motherboard, connection ports etc.) or cost too much seeing as lappy was old.

Luckily they were able to get all the data off the hard drive and onto an external drive. This was really the most important thing for me. I had a lot of old stuff backed up but I hadn't done a backup in about 11 months (I know, I know, will try harder).

So now I am personal laptop lacking (I have my work macbook pro) and trying to decide what to do. I don't really want to rely on my work laptop for all my photos/music etc so I need to get something new, which will most likely be a mac. I guess that will be my birthday present to myself.

Any advice on what to get (pro, air, just an ipad??) would be nice. I also need to find the best way of recycling my old laptop (and the previous old one too - which still works, even with it's 10GB hard drive). There must be some good places around to take old electronics?

So I might be a little slow with the updates now but I'll do my best :-)