Heart-Attack Time

Posted by Colin Harvey Oct 20, 2009

When I bought my new Toshiba netbook a few weeks ago, I learned quickly that while 1 gig of RAM is adequate most of the time, there are occasions --such as when AVG is doing its daily sweep and Adobe are downloading upgrades-- that it's not quite enough memory. So I duly bought a 2 gigabyte Memory Extension Module from Toshiba.

It had no instructions, so after a week of trying to get through via phones and e-mails, I finally managed to speak to a human being. He kindly navigated me to the correct e-dress, which I'd never have found without his help --the website is as navigable as a mangrove swamp. I downloaded it, and on Sunday night fitted the new module.

The netbook didn't work.

I re-fitted the original chip. That didn't work either.

Good job I saved the assignments to the USB, I thought, plugging said USB into the old laptop. Otherwise I'd be up shit creek without a paddle, since non-submission is an automatic failure.

Only I hadn't saved them!!!!

I'd saved an earlier set of files which omitted last week's work.

Cue a frantic evening trying to get the netbook working before giving up for fear of damaging the pins beyond repair. Faced with the possibility of having to re-write a 400 word short story from scratch, re-doing my work plan for the year and unable to access the lecture slides by Tuesday morning, I spent a sleepless Sunday night and anxious anxious Monday before managing to get the netbook to the local PC guy after work.

It then took him all of about 30 seconds to get it working again, leaving me rather sheepish. I hadn't plugged the chip in quite enough.

In future, I'll save assignments to both USB and the other laptop. Lesson learned.