Recently, I’ve been out of action with many of my electronic gadgets, including accessing features on my car GPS, changing songs on my MP3 player and taking pictures from my mobile phone. Why is that? Simply put, my laptop, after a struggle, has decided to give up the ghost. Naturally I tried just about everything I could think of before surrendering to this fact, such as a system restore, talking to a specialist and even taking it to the IT guy at work. All, however, to no avail.

Naturally I was upset about my laptop acting up - not one of us would relish a key piece of technology deciding it doesn’t want to play anymore. What made it REALLY bad though was finding out exactly how much I now relied on my home computer. Apart from of course blogging, I didn’t think that it was a 100% necessary bit of kit. I know now how it is.

On the day of sending my laptop off to be fixed, I found that I needed a telephone rather urgently. My first instinct was to was to switch the wireless router back on, almost puzzling why I’d turned it off. I then grabbed the laptop bag and of course it was empty. My laptop was away to be repaired. So what did I have to do? Resort to the phone book of course. You could say that it showed the limitations of the ‘old’ technology of the printed word - I wanted a new company that apparently wasn’t in my latest phone book.

Secondly, I wanted to apply for a job. I had to borrow a laptop, find it one of my old emails with my CV on it and finally manage to send it. I’m now borrowing a laptop of a relative on a regular basis in order to not only keep my online life alive but to also ensure that I can actually do the day-to-day tasks that I need to do more efficiently than otherwise - whether this checking my phone bill, looking up phone numbers or simply keeping up contact with people. The world really has moved on and I didn’t realise how much of a necessary bit of kit my computer was until I didn’t have it any more.

Luckily, it should be repaired in a few days and I personally can’t wait to get it back. I’ll update with a review of the service when it is returned.

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