The saga of the laptop
The saga of the laptop. It seems like a boring, mundane topic. But it has been my primary writing tool since 2016. That is eight years. And it has been a lot of places, and spent a lot of time overseas in Southeast Asia, in destinations such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar, Singapore, and Malaysia, as well as a couple islands I am less than free to talk about. Despite having dodged a few bullets, it has remained fairly bulletproof. It has, however, been showing signs of old age.
The battery had finally given up the ghost, and it’s not something that you just slide in and slide out. You have to tear the thing apart to get to it. I watched a video on performing the necessary surgery. It looked imposing, so I put it off for a couple years. Finally, I had to do something. I called the nearby tech shop, The girl said she thought they could replace the battery but her supervisor was the one that repairs laptops so feel free to bring it in tomorrow for a look when he gets back.
I looked at the video again, decided it wasn’t so bad so I ordered a battery on the Zon. Installing it was the easy part. The aftermath, not so much.
I’m not sure what triggered a reset of the security features, it may have been a perfect storm of a botched update, or it might have been the removal of the battery, I don’t know. Initially it seemed to work okay. The next day, I was locked out of it, and by the way the battery wasn’t charging and it wouldn’t run on the battery. To make a long story short, every means of logging in was disabled except the password, and it wouldn’t take a password because a password was never set. The IT guy that originally set it up for me, however, fortunately had a back door in to it, and he was able to reset (establish actually) a password and that saved the day.
Sort of. It… works, but some of the login features have managed to become disabled, and a few other things don’t work. The important things do. The only recourse is a fresh OS reinstall, but no thanks. The bottom line is that the next time you see a blog post featuring a laptop computer, it will probably be a different one. Anyway, that is my rant for the month. The monthly rant. I like it.
