This morning I set up a brand new laptop for some friends. Their old laptop was so slow that it was almost unusable. Which meant that they didn’t use it. He is a member of a national car club which sends all its member information out by email. He hadn’t logged in for over a week and was feeling that he couldn’t really participate in the club activities and had been left behind on news and events.
They live in a rural location but are lucky enough to have broadband that works at nearly 6Mbs. Not that you would have know that with the old laptop. Even loading an internet page took forever.
A few weeks ago, in desperation, they asked me if I could come round and speed up the computer. I solemnly pronounced that it was overdue for retirement and sent them off to the computer shop with a list of do’s and don’ts. We’d done some homework online and they had picked out a couple of models they liked the look of that were on offer.
You won’t be surprised to hear that when they first entered the shop, the models that were on offer were nowhere to be seen. Obviously the shop wanted them to purchase something more expensive. However, armed with their list, they persevered and managed to buy one of the discounted models. Much to the chagrin of the sales assistant who told them they “didn’t want to buy an end of range model”.
The computer is now set up and running well – it took about an hour and a half. Contrast that with the time it took me to set up my own laptop 2 years ago. It took me all day. I have a large amount of documents and photos, lots of software and lots of email addresses to set up. Fortunately I had the best online backup on my side and was able to log into my account and download the data onto the hard drive of my new laptop.
Imagine what would have happened if my friends had a lot of data to transfer. Their old laptop works so slowly that just transferring the data would have taken hours. This is one area where a best online backup is the perfect answer. There would have been no need to fiddle about transferring the data. We would have connected the new laptop to the internet, logged into their online backup account and, hey presto, have downloaded all the data.