So as mentioned yesterday, my laptop is sitting next to me, looking very shiny and pretty, but completely silent. I spoke to Dell support this morning and after managing to exhaust the call centre guy's script of variations on "Have you tried turning it off and on again?", he eventually logged a case for me, and I'm now waiting for a phone call from (presumably the local) support engineer.

One thing I'm not too worried about is the data sitting on the laptop. I know it's there – just a matter of getting a new BIOS (and/or possibly motherboard) and it will be fine. I also know I have a full backup on my Windows Home Server, which is reassuring.

One of the first things I did when I joined LobsterPot was to create a Live Mesh folder to store business-related documents. So that means I've still got access to those documents via the web or my other machine at home – handy as after experimenting with various online solutions, I ended up reverting to using an Excel spreadsheet to track my work hours too!

I've also recently been making use of some of the training content at Microsoft Learning. I download the content to the laptop and have been working my way through it on the bus to and from work (must be riveting for the lucky people who get to sit next to me!). There is an offline reader just for this purpose, though it does have its annoyances (eg. no keyboard shortcuts, doesn't allow text to be enlarged) but one nice thing is that it synchronises your progress. So I can still log into the Microsoft E-Learning site and am able to pick up where I left off, using the "online" mode instead.

Then there's email, IM etc, which all work fine from where ever you are. So, while having a dead laptop is a huge pain, it isn't the end of the world.

Good news.. I just had a call from Dell and they're coming out on Monday. Hope they can fix it quickly.