Under the covers

Being out on the road all the time has it's risks and my worst nightmare came true a couple of weeks ago.

My Sony Vaio laptop has performed flawlessly for more than 15 months despite being lugged around in a normal briefcase every single day and being left on virtually permanently when "docked" in my home office.

For a week or two it had been making a bit of a strange noise which I put down to a noisy fan. Then, one morning I got the "Blue screen of death". Booting in safe mode worked for a while and then another crash, and another, and another until it wouldn't even boot up at all. Seems like that noisy fan had caused the motherboard to overheat.

A call to Sony established that it was going to have to be returned to them by Courier and I'd have a 10-15 day wait for the repair to be completed. 10-15 days! Without the main tool of my job? Disaster!

I arranged for the courier to collect and set off for the local Sony store. I can't do my job without a PC and the salesman couldn't believe his luck when I virtually ran into the store and ordered the most expensive laptop they had in stock.

After a very long and protracted process to uninstall Vista (a 30 page Sony manual provided with the laptop!) and re-build the machine with XP, I was ready to restore my data. I blogged about remote backup services a few months ago and now came the acid test.

Mozy passed it with flying colours. My main project data was restored within 30 minutes and I was up and running. My last backup had been automatically scheduled and had run about 30 minutes before the laptop died so I lost no data at all.

Don't wait for it to happen to you, it's so easy to think it will never happen but hardware goes wrong, especially laptops that are subjected to the worst conditions of any computer. There are lots of backup options out there now and cost very little to subscribe to.

Oh, and even better advice is that when your PC starts making a funny noise, get it investigated sooner rather than later...