I’ve now owned my laptop for over a year, in fact its getting on for 18 months which in PC terms is quite old. I’ve fallen in and out of love with my laptop, the need, when I purchased it, was for small and portable while remaining powerful enough for the software I run. It certainly lived up to its promises and still does today, that’s why I’m reluctant to part with it just yet, but as I’ve said, it hasn’t been plain sailing all the way, then again is it ever???

I originally had anti virus trouble with Onecare claiming to be out of date, I spent a good couple of weeks swearing at the machine before restoring it back to factory default which fixed the problem. It then served me well for many months before going off the rails, random freezes drove me mad for a good few weeks, I ran test after test with no results, I even had another technician take a look and his results were clean, so another factory reset soon sorted the issue. I updated the wireless connection with a Draft N card, that was very fast but again not 100% happy, so after a while I went back to good old G speed.

And so all has been well for the last 6 months or so, I rode the "I’d really like an Apple" storm which wasn’t helped by the launch of Air, but no, I stuck with my trusty red laptop, I still love the unusualness of the red lid.

I even recently made an upgrade to Vista Ultimate without a hitch. But of course there has been a couple of little issues bothering me for a while. The first is an update to the bios. In fact up until last week it hasn’t received a bios update since purchase. I was recommended to update the bios when previously trying to sort its issues, I selected the latest version update from the manufacturers website but each time I tryed to run the update it failed????

Finally last week after a good Google session I came across the same situation with the same laptop model and a good read later I was able to update the bios.

My real concern was the other issue! The DVD burner for quite a while has been a pain in the ASS! It reads discs fine, it even burns them fine, or so it appears, until you take that disc and place it in another PC or audio player to discover the disc is blank. Checking the official download site reveals nothing, in fact the updates other than the bios are very limited. So once again armed with my Google search I dived in to the internet to solve the mystery. There wasn’t a great deal of info regarding this but I did however stumble across a link pointing me towards the manufacturers website in Korea, a few minutes later after brushing up on my Korean and a click in the dark I managed to find a firmware update for the DVD drive sat on my desktop. It just amazes me how the official UK site can’t offer the update but if your Korean/guess work is up to scratch then you can finally make your drive work!

It’s not just software that needs updating, your hardware requires love and attention too, if you haven’t done so before, head over to your PC manufacturers website and look for updates, a good place to start is the bios, then the DVD drive, and if you’re feeling brave how about your internet router, you may find things start to work a little better, or like me, they just work again.

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