For the second time in my Acer Travelmate 8104’s 18month life, it decided to break at the most inconvienient time once I had arrived back in Kingston from the Easter break. This time the laptop simply failed to turn on at all ever, and after being taken to a repair company to confirm my worst suspicions, the motherboard was at fault and would need to be replaced, which would have then been the laptop’s 3rd motherboard. However, as Myles’ Acer laptop also broke a few months ago with similar problems, a replacement motherboard was priced at £800 by Acer + £300 labour.

So, with the laptop being far too much to be worthy of a repair, I went on the hunt for a new laptop, and as Myles blogged at the time, the number of decent laptops in the high street are few and far between, especially if you want Vista. So, we looked online, and after a while debating I decided on a customised Dell Inspiration 6400. But, thats where the second wave of issues arose, which was after ordering the laptop, I recieved a phone call from Dell telling me that they won’t deliver the laptop to Kingston as my debit card was registered in Torquay, to help prevent fraud. So with not many other options, I went to my bank to change my address, and then re-order a new laptop the next day.

So, for the next nine days I waited for my new laptop to arrive, using Myles’ laptop to check my emails hourly it would seem, and try to sort out Dell to make them not charge me for the original order which they had reserved the money out of my account for. But today, all was resolved, and my laptop arrived at the door! So now I’m back online and able to do work again alot more easily, and at a much faster speed since my new Dell laptop has alot higher specs than my old 18 month old laptop now has.