Tags: Innovation, Lenovo, Lenovo 3000 N100, Notebooks, ThinkPad, Mac, Formatting, Backups, E-Mail, iPod, Apple, Nokia, N95, Twitter, Social Media, Rich Media, Mobile 2.0, Social Software, Social Computing, Social Networking, Web 2.0, IBM
As you may have noticed, yesterday I didn’t get a chance to create a weblog post in here, although I got the chance to respond to a number of different weblog posts (And some more I still need to get to shortly) and there was actually a good reason for it. Due to several circumstances (Rather busy in meetings and conference calls at work, amongst others) I run into the trouble of having to re-format the hard drive of my Lenovo 3000 N100 notebook after having some issues with my computer firewall. Not happy about the whole situation, since it has knocked me out for several days, as you may have been able to read further in some of my twitterings. But in the end I didn’t have much of a choice. I had to do it.
I haven’t weblogged much about this actually, but I am actually having a great time with this particular notebook. One of the best I have used in the last 7 to 8 years! (Yes, I know, I still need to check the Mac 😉 heh). So it was a bit painful having to do the re-formatting as I knew it would knock me out for a day or so while I backed up everything, formatted and installed everything back in shape. But still necessary as things got rather nasty in the end.
Last time I did re-format a hard drive was from my previous ThinkPad a couple of years ago and back then I can certainly say that it was a very painful experience! Not having connectivity during the entire day and also working with multiple DVDs to back up stuff and get it back to work afterwards is not the most pleasant of happenings during the course of the day. So I was afraid of having to suffer from the same thing this time around. But the truth is that I didn’t.
You may be wondering why not, right? Well, mainly, for two different reasons. The first one, the two iPods I have at the moment providing me with 90 GB of disk space to back up everything in a single process and then get the data out of them into the notebook again in a single attempt. Amazing the kind of impact such devices have got, when having to store large amounts of content in just a few minutes in such tiny gadgets. Just making use of these two helped me speed up the process tremendously of backing up and reinstalling stuff rather quick! And rather painless, too!
And the second reason is, of course, the lovely N95 from Nokia. What an amazing experience! Up until now I was happily making use of it for a good number of different tasks and always learning something new along the process, as I have mentioned in a previous weblog post. But yesterday was the first day that I was actually making extensive use of it in order to have access to the Internet. And WOW! What an amazing experience! I thought I would be struggling with it quite a bit, but on the contrary. Incredibly intuitive and productive navigating the Web with such a tiny device. No doubt! Loved it!
Certainly, it may not be the best of experiences to write extensive e-mails or weblog entries, but certainly to be able to subscribe to your favourite feeds and catch up with some of them, including your podcasts and vodcasts is just priceless. So much so that, since it is easier for me to carry with me the mobile phone than the notebook, I still continue to catch up with feeds through it today, specially for the rich media feeds I am subscribed to.
Then the fact I can check out my external e-mail to see if there are any urgent messages is a big plus for sure. Without taking into account as well how I have been able to keep up with my twitterings on what people were up to as well, so it didn’t feel that lonely as in previous occasions. In the end, and after finishing off late last night installing everything back into the notebook I realised that now I not only have one computer at home, but two! And one of them nicely integrated with my mobile phone! I guess I could now go and travel a bit just bringing with me the N95, which, amongst other things, would be rather handy to keep me connected as well as health-wise.
Who would have ever thought about that, eh? This is, to me, indeed, what Innovation is all about. Being able to make you productive again in the shortest time possible with a rather painless experience for whatever the tasks at hand. And on top of that, I got to do a massive clean up of my Lenovo 3000 N100 and quit installing those applications I haven’t used in months! Look now at all of that available disk space waiting to be used!
