Memoirs of Lappy the MacBook

At the start of May my beloved MacBook’s (aka Lappy) life sadly and suddenly came to an end. I loved that little lappy so much and it seems silly to say I’ll miss it but I really will. I bought it second hand but in amazing working condition and a totally bargain at the time. I treated it with so much love but stupidly swatted a fly near the keyboard (hot summer in Ibiza 2012) and somehow broke my space bar in the process, karma got me good. Now most people would just simply get it fixed, I however left it and made do, that was until the little nobbly bit stopped working. At this point I was still living in Ibiza and had been quoted a ridiculous amount of money to fix it, so waited until I was back in the UK. It turns out it costs pretty much the same price here and most of the hipster Genius Bar geeks at the apple shop, basically laughed at me for waiting to get it sorted, as it was so old and slow! I bought an apple Bluetooth keyboard which is great, plus a keyboard app built in on the Mac, so between the two I had it covered or so I thought….

Lappy loving the football

Good times

Over the last year I’ve found it so hard to type properly (like I am now) without my space bar. I was constantly making mistakes, plus having to edit my text took an age and overall the poor macbook was slow and old, the geeks were right but I wasn’t going to admit it. Phoebe (like most toddlers I’m sure) is fascinated my by big bright laptop or smart phone, or in fact anything shiny so it’s always a challenge trying to check emails or attempt some blogging with her around. To overcome this, I started to include her, by watching funny YouTube clips together, Kids Songs and of course Peppa and the gang. It was going really well until the little minx wasn’t happy with just watching it, she wanted to touch the screen, play with the lid and smash up the keys. I have a 3 strike rule when it comes to this type of thing, as I believe boundaries are important and kids need them to learn, it’s a tough job dealing with the strops but much better than a broken laptop.

One afternoon we were happily watching Peppa Pig, in the Peppa car that Daddy Pig built for her birthday (yes, she makes me sit in it) when Phoebe decided she didn’t want to watch it anymore so shoved it off…straight onto the floor! I couldn’t believe it, I was first in shock, then quickly concerned about my lappy, which surprisingly still worked but the little lady had some serious making up to do. The laptop seemed fine, by fine I mean slow and old, so I assumed nothing was wrong. When the battery finally died, I quickly ran to grab the charger as normal and plug her in, always leaving it to the last minute. The orange light came on, I popped the kettle on thinking by the time it loads up and sorts itself out I’ll have a nice hot coffee and a laptop ready to go, this wasn’t the case. It just wouldn’t turn on, nothing was working. I gave it another hour or so, let it charge up and try again…still nothing, by this point I was getting really annoyed, then worried. It turns out the little shove might have actually done more damage than I first thought.

Whilst not having a laptop for over a week was difficult for normal everyday things, like online banking and paying bills etc it was also so nice to have a break from blogging. As much as I’ve been loving it and still loving it, I’ve found it’s given me more time to really enjoy the little moment in my world plus the break has made me eager to get back into blogging with a fresh set of eyes, lots of inspiration and most importantly a shiny new MacBook Pro to do it all on. As mentioned above I will of course miss my old slow lappy but there were also some very frustrating and annoying traits that came with having no spacebar among others things that I certainly won’t miss.

• Noises. After the fly swatting incident my laptop had always made this very strange noise, as if the space bar was being used but stuck, which resulted in a constant horrible high pitch banging sound whenever she was first turned on. Sometimes it didn’t do this, which shocked me but pretty much always that annoying sound.

• Keyboard App. This is a great feature of the MacBooks and it did help me, but it also had a life of it’s own. It was impossible to shrink the size, without it going huge and taking up the whole screen. I also had to position it in the right place, as having it over an advert meant that I would occasionally miss the spacebar and open up some random advert video, most irritating.

• Shame. I don’t often get embarrassed but recently the state of my manky macbook was causing me some blushed cheeks, if I was braved enough to take it out in public that was or to those genius geeks.

• Speed. The slow, sloth speed of my lappy, was also a massive annoyance as she always played up and just gave me the multicoloured wheel when ever I choose to show someone old photo’s or stream a show/song.

• Randomness. My lappy always seems to have a mind of its own, towards the end the space bar issue’s got worse and upon opening the laptop after being charged, not only did it make the “noises” it also just spaced out and would think you were pressing the space bar, so wouldn’t let you type anything (if you get me) until you had pressed the fake (app) space bar. Very time consuming.

• Typing. This has been the main issue. My touch typing skills have been totally tested whilst having a weird set up and now I’m finding it awkward to type properly again.

The timing of lappy’s passing came at quite a good time, as we had just had Daddy Pig’s tax rebate, which was suppose to go towards our family holiday in a few months but has since been spent on a shiny new MacBook Pro. We all use the laptop but me mainly and I couldn’t be happier typing this up now. We still have to get all our photos and music off the old one, a friend is kindly doing this for us as I don’t think I could face the genius apple geeks another time.

New MacBook Pro

Getting to grips with my toy!

What new tech have you recently indulged in? Let me know I always love to hear about new gadgets and gizmo’s out there.

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