Well last night the noisy laptop shut itself down I an told in the middle of a game Roller Coast Tycoon. Now like a lot of people I suspect, I have a day job that keeps me busy but another job that I never officially asked for - that of home network administrator. This job is thankless, requires me to know everything about every fault immediatly and holds me accountable for the performance of the internet, whether or not the problem stems from withing the home network or not. It started so simply many years ago with one PC, no internet and no mobile devices, oh those were simpler times.
Now a few years on we have routers, switches, desktops, laptops, tablets, phones, game consoles and media centres. I can't say I'm looking forward to the fridge and oven joining the network, although we already have had the television and the blu-ray player on the network now for a long time, and the printer is available to all through wireless these days and we even have headphones aren't wired to anything.
So I'm struggling to decide whether the laptop that is overheating should go back to the shop, but my network customers are telling me that an overheating laptop isn't good enough. Now these same customers would have me ring the ISP and tell them to speed the whole internet up so there demands of this administrator are sometimes beyond the realms of what is within my ability to deliver. I guess retailers must have this problem, sir we know your laptop is overheating but why the hell don't you just buy another one and save us all the grief. The answer I think is laptops cost a lot of money and you expect they should last three to five years, and that you will upgrade because you are missing the new shiny featurs like touch screens, not because they sold you a brick.
