Well, sort of.
Posts have been slow (well, non-existent) on this blog since Thursday because our lovely laptop was not happy. A rather unpleasant, grinding sound had begun to emit from my dependable internet conduit on Wednesday of this week, rendering extended usage an unpleasant prospect.
Starting up the machine was a trial, downloading my regular tranche of podcasts was an exercise in ignoring constant background noise and on top of that, my wife now works from home, so a dead or dying laptop was a total non-starter. Action had to be taken, dag-blast-it!
Dusty, dying computer fan – Flickr image via user R. Berteig.
My first fear was, perhaps naturally, that the hard drive was on the way out and that I was due for a serious wallet-depleting repair session with the attendant data recovery costs which that would imply. Duly prepared for bad news, we packed up our laptop and took it with us to our nearest PC repair joint and steeled ourselves for bad news.
Bad news, believe it or not, which didn’t actually come.
Our problem was connected to the picture above – the laptop’s fan had died on us. And why had it died?
You adorable, kooky, computer-killing goof, you!
Yep, the computer’s best friend, animal fur. Our tame computer repair chap rang us before proceeding with the fixes to show us the state of our laptop and it was like a scene from grooming day at a dog styling salon – it really doesn’t help our favourite digital devices to live around two very furry dogs and to have to cope with the shedding and general doggy detritus which accompanies life with a fluffy pal.
Thank the Happy Computer Sentinels for their overwatch duties on our laptop, who’ll soon be back home with us. This post, in fact, is being written on an old XP based desktop machine which has more than proved its mettle during this weekend and been a real help in a jam – a machine that, ironically, I cracked open to look at in the last year and did some remedial work on. #
Including cleaning and sorting out its dusty old fan…
Fluffrick 