You know, I’m thinking I need to start finding something else to do with my life other than be a geek — or at least make it so that I can survive and get everything done on any computer quickly and easily.
As I mentioned before, I’m working on my old laptop until my newer one is repaired. I had finally gotten the thing up and running and working fine, but then working last night, the AC adapter started fritzing out, and finally died. I noticed it was just a frayed wire, but attempts to repair it didn’t help, as I think it shorted itself out before I could even work on it. And naturally, since it’s a holiday weekend, getting a hold of anybody to overnight me a new one is going to be impossible until Tuesday.
Since I split my time between offices, I basically have to work on a laptop to have all my applications and data with me all the time. It’d be one thing if I were just doing geek stuff, as I could probably fit a good chunk of those apps on a USB key and work wherever I wanted. The problem is that I do a ton of design and marketing stuff as well for each of the companies I work for. The Adobe design programs aren’t really portable, and the size of some of the files I work on would fill up the USB keys I have pretty quickly. A laptop just makes life far easier for me to get my work done quickly from anywhere. But when laptops die, I basically have to set myself up somewhere else.
I can fix everybody else’s computers and Web sites, but all my stuff seems to all break at once and at the worst time.
In the meanwhile, I’ve done a bunch of cleaning of my computer closet here at the office, so I am at least getting something done, but I’m just not in the mood to resetup another desktop with all my apps and such. I think I just need to talk a week-long vacation out to the woods somewhere and leave my computer at home.
Comments
I have a similar problem switching between computers, but found a rather simple solution: an external 500 GB hard disk. Mine is a Western Digital MyBook, but if you want to go for cheap & fast, I suggest getting a Firewire external disk enclosure and putting a good ol’ trustworthy Barracuda in it with 5 year warranty.
That’d be ideal, Paul, but real life, not quite possible. Ideally, I’d just carry around an eSATA drive that’d have all my data, apps, etc… and use it to boot the systems I might need to work on (all similar configs so I wouldn’t have to have drivers reconfigure when I boot). But then I’d need a couple good systems that I could setup eSATA on (and I say eSATA as USB 2.0 just ain’t going to cut it).
But that is how I’m getting access to my data from both of these laptops right now — I have them both in external enclosures, I just don’t have enough USB ports on the system I’m currently working on, dag nabbit (as each requires two USB ports, one for data, one for power).
Back On My Own Computer
Mentioned that I was working off a variety of computers until I got an AC adapter for my laptop. It’s here, my mail is all downloading into Outlook, and I…