A personal note on technology dependence
2023-10-02
Oh boy, this one certainly wasn't planned and I'm very sorry that it's a bit late, but life can be unpredictable at times and I'm just happy to have managed the challenging situation of the past several days as well as I did. For those not interested in a rather personal story, the TLDR is that my daily driver laptop I depend on for studying died last week and I somehow had to get a replacemet as soon as possible during an already stressful exam phase. Everyone else is invited to sit back, relax and learn about all my recent struggles as well as some general thoughts on technology dependence...
To start things off, I think it makes sense to first describe how my study setup evolved over the last few years and in what state it was, when it broke. Although rather common in other countries like the U.S. for over a decade now, I was part of one of the first school years here in Germany to really utilize digital devices for note-taking. Therefore, I was required to buy a brand-new iPad back in 2017, which I then used to write most of my notes for school with until about 2021. However, I only used it for the subjects in which I could efficiently type my notes and stuck to paper for math, physics and so on. This did not change, when I replaced it with a ThinkPad X250 in late 2021, but around a year ago I was so tired of the paper mess that emerges even with really good organization that I decided to pull the trigger on a used ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 1, which I got for a very good price. Granted, it was in certainly used condition, some cracked key caps and a dead battery needed to be replaced, but after these fixes it was a quick, reliable and well-built machine, that somehow managed to be more fun to use than my multiple times more expensive desktop setup and most importantly featured a pencil to take handwritten notes with.
Sadly, it decided to begin randomly rebooting during regular use last week and that's not something I can accept for my daily driver. I obviously tried to find the cause of this error, but nothing I tried made it reproducable or even dared to fix it. It randomly occured when it was plugged in or on battery power, when it was in laptop or tablet mode and when it was under heavy or light load - just to name a few variables I investigated. With a BIOS reset also not working, it became clear that I needed a replacement. Now, there obviously never is a good time for something to break - except maybe when you already decided to replace something and need an excuse to do it -, but with a very important exam right around the corner and some more to follow, this really was a terrifying situation to be in. Fortunately enough, I have several up-to-date backups of my data so data loss wasn't a concern and the financial wealth to order a used replacemet device right away, which is just what I did on Wednesday.
The choosen ThinkPad X390 Yoga not only arrived within 3 days at my door, but also is in excellet condition, has a brand-new battery, double the RAM (16 GB) and a FHD screen that unlike my pervious laptop does not require flaky fractional scaling, which all combined into a really promising picture. However, I forgot about the omni-present Thunderbolt controller issues of this generation and was therefore greated with the message "Configuring Thunderbolt Controller - Do not power off" for about 40 seconds at every boot. I don't think I need to explain how annoying this is, so I installed a fresh copy of Windows, which is stupidly required to do the controller firmware update, and followed the official instructions for doing the update procedure. With my bad luck not ending, this update didn't resolve the issue, but caused the controller to disappear from all software and stop functioning all together. At least, the boot message wasn't there anymore, but this only ment that I couldn't charge the device, which uses USB-C as its only power input, and therefore was on a battle against the battery running out to fix this very unlikely result of the update.
In the end, with only 17 % battery remaining and none of the trustworthy guides I found helping, I decided to open the device, search for some kind of reset switch and just press it for a minute in the absence of a better solution - I mean, it couldn't get worse. And truth be told, this actually fixed the problem - the charging is now working again, the boot message is gone and the controller reports the updated firmware version to the OS. A journey I don't want my worst enemy to face and a happy end as it could be written in a children's book. It could have ended catastrophically just as well, but it didn't and that tell us something about technology dependence in general IMHO.
You should never ever rely on a single point of failure to keep your important documents safe , store your irreplaceable family photos or keep your business running. Like in the aviation sector it is indispensable to have redundant systems, multiple backups and frequent emergency tests for the things that really matter to you, even when this costs a substantial amount of additional money. Way to few people don't realize this until it is too late and I don't want you to be one of these, as the financial or even worse emotional impact can be incurable. So, overthink your current backup strategy, evaluate your priorities from time to time and secure what is most important to you...
PS: This article has been written on the new X390 Yoga and I think I will love this device even more than my old X1 Yoga