The husband of one of my clients has successfully demonstrated that knocking over a glass of water onto his wife’s laptop while she is working is not conducive to marital bliss. Her display went blank and the laptop sounded a beeping alarm. When things had settled down a bit, she called me. We were able to get Windows to boot, but the keyboard was largely dead.

I told them that I could take it apart and clean the various pieces, but since it had their business data on it, and they wanted to be sure, they took it to a store that specializes in laptops. That store wanted $85 to inspect with no promise of anything, and if a new keyboard was needed, it would be about $150. That is about three times what the manufacturer’s Web site quotes. It didn’t take my clients long to decide it was better to buy a new laptop, which they did.

In the meantime, I tried to clean up their old keyboard and found under the keys an interesting mixture partly composed of scrambled eggs, peanut butter, and jam. Instead of continuing to mess with it, I bought a used keyboard on eBay for $26.

They brought both computers to me to set up the new one and transfered data. That is when the fun really started. Starting with the old laptop, I removed the DRAM and wireless card and cleaned everything. Then I exchanged the keyboard and booted. It worked!

The old laptop had XP and the new one has Vista home premium, which has a feature called “Easy Transfer.” I suppose it is easy compared to some things. But after I installed the software on the old laptop and connected both to my LAN, things did not go easily. My first mistake was to do it in the evening. The estimated transfer was 4.86 gig, so it would take a while. I left the room while the machines happily talked to each other and seemed to be getting along nicely. I went to bed. In the morning, I discovered that shortly after I left, the new machine decided it was time to check for viruses. Apparently the interaction of the anti-virus software was distasteful to the transfer process — at least that seems like a reasonable hypothesis.

So I started over. And then went about other tasks. Things went more smoothly — for a while. My client called in a panic because she had received some email that was critical to her business and needed to see it now! We stopped the transfer (I suppose it could have been temporarily halted, but I did not know how and she was not in a mood to wait for me to figure it out).

After I re-started, it bombed again while I was looking after another client. One of the first signs of insanity is to keep repeating an action and expecting different results. So this time I told the easy transfer to only transfer the settings instead of the recommended total transfer. It crashed again near the end, but this time I did something different. I looked at the contents of the new computer and found that it had transferred correctly! So I had a real “duh” moment. Why did I not check before?

I was inattentive and multi-tasking with other things, so I had only glanced at the warning window that indicated when the system that stopped the transfer had failed. It did not say that any part of the transfer had succeeded. Here is another learning experience.

Both computers work. The client is happy, and I have another life experience.

There is not much here about helping tutor seniors except for the obvious lesson of teaching them to avoid having liquids nearby while working. I suppose they also learned that I am cheaper than some of the competition even if I stumble on transfers. I certainly learned (again) to concentrate on the task at hand rather than sandwich it between other tasks.

Click here to read about my new tutorial on helping seniors. The new version has grown considerably over the original. It has more topics and anecdotes, and fewer typos. While you’re at it, check out my expanded tutorial on decision theory.

[tags]senior computing, senior learning, computer tutor, computer repair[/tags]