Thursday, April 25, 2019

A New Laptop . . . Again

Last week I thought my IT department was to blame for the poor performance of my laptop. It turns out that my laptop really did break. There is an internal ribbon cable for my keyboard and mouse that needed replacing. I could have fixed it with an $8 part but my IT department just gave me a new laptop instead. The bad ribbon cable is a common problem with that era of MacBook Pro.

One of the reasons I keep adding to this blog is that it serves as a technical notebook. When it came time to copy all of the stuff off my old computer, I just looked up what I did the last time and that allowed me to get my new machine set up quickly. I picked up the new computer on Monday and returned my old one this morning. The only thing I had forgotten to include in my last instructions is to copy over the VPN settings. While my IT department set up the primary server settings, there is an older secondary one that will often work when the other doesn't. For those keeping track, I made sure to:
  1. Copy all of the files from my backup
  2. Copy bookmarks from my browser
  3. Set up printers
  4. New: copy VPN settings
I'm not sure I like the new computer though. While my old computer had an intermittent keyboard and trackpad failure, my new computer likes to crash and reboot itself every 10 minutes. I have tried a number of troubleshooting techniques to figure out what could be causing the problem. So far, I haven't figured it out. Monday I had a number of problems with the laptop and then it ran flawlessly on Tuesday. Yesterday the crashing returned. Today it has run without incident all day. My hope is that the crashing is related to copying all of the old files onto the computer and then having to encrypt the files. Time will tell.

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