Recovery

My local geek shop managed to reactivate the sick laptop yesterday afternoon and, hearing this, I rushed across the road under a steady rain storm and was whisked behind the scenes into the “room at the back” where a variety of PC’s and laptops lay with their insides hanging out – all rather like a scene from an early Star Wars movie. “I managed to get it going again without the Windows XP operating system” said my geek (a big bloke in his mid-20’s, all heavy metal t-shirt and hair). “Can you repair it?” I asked like a worried parent. “Impossible to say at the moment, it’s a hardware problem obviously and we will have to spend some time looking into it.” At which point I asked permission to take the limping machine back home and link it to my new laptop using a software package called “TransferMyPC”, which does all the thinking for me. I hook up the two machines with a fancy cable and press the right buttons to begin an 8 hour file transfer that ends just after 2.00am in the morning. How do I know? Because I’m sat there watching, unable to get to sleep. Its 4.30am before I manage to fall asleep and my alarm call is at 6.00am. Today, I look like my grandfather did when he was 75 years old. The last time I had so little sleep in a week was waiting for babies to be born and watching them afterwards. The good news is that most of my files are now safely restored and I’m geared up to be working back at full speed. Sleep deprivation has kicked in today and I don’t feel like doing very much. Luckily, its a business development day – so no clients were harmed in the making of this insomniac coach. I intend to rest, really take it slow, because tomorrow I’m travelling up to Scotland to speak at a large dental conference and I want to be as chirpy as I can. As a friend commented yesterday, in an ideal world we would all have 2 laptops, both fired up and ready to go, so that when the crashes occur (this is 3 in 3 years) we can carry on working and pass the repairs on to a team member.