Sue

Jellybeanz has edited their long post which included their negative assumptions about you. Luckily for them, nobody had actually quoted some of Jellybeanz' posts on here in their own posts, and they have edited more than one of them, so they have disappeared for ever.

Pleased to see that the original very long and very negative post starting this thread has been edited down to one sentence 😂

Something you have to pay for isn't actually a "blog", is it?

Oh come on jazzer, it was funny. It amused me, anyway 😃

Might you be better just buying a new microwave?! 😀

Someone is going to have a look at it for me who thinks there is something else he can try to boot it up and at least diagnose the problem and get the recent data off without removing any screws, thanks. I had already had a long conversation with someone from Which Tech who seemed to know what he was talking about, before I took it up to John Lewis.

Sadly neither the F1 nor the enter key worked. Still a black screen. I tried both several times. And the red facial recognition light which used to flash at the top of the screen doesn't come on any more either (it was previously, even with the black screen). I think I've probably reached the end of the road with what I can try without physically going inside the laptop? Thanks so much for your help though, it's much appreciated.

It's a bit of a faff to sign up to it 🙄

I had what was at the time the worst meal of my life there. Superseded (sp?) by another one locally the Christmas just gone, but that's another sad and much worse saga.

Crikey, well that must be the first time in decades!

Well at least it's better than leaving the poo on the pavement.

Substack is what many people are using these days. It was explained in the post above!

Too late now, but when I had a problem with a window which stuck open either my insurance or my rescue service (I think it must have been) put the car into a secure enclosure somewhere overnight prior to arranging for it to be fixed. However it might be different if it's due to vandalism.

Also the food is terrible, if someone was intending to eat there .......

Haven't tried yet, sorry, wasn't feeling on top form, going to look at it tomorrow morning (Saturday). AKA this afternoon (Saturday) , having got up late.

Maybe better not to encourage them. They might go away.

Thanks Vladi, I will try this. I was very unimpressed by the John Lewis tech attempts, but unfortunately not surprised. However whatever I do, the outcome is likely to be that whatever is wrong it will need repairing, and as the laptop is under guarantee I don't want to do anything which could invalidate the guarantee, as something else could go wrong once this is fixed (it's a two year guarantee). The thing that most annoys me about the way they go about things is just starting off with a factory reset. It's not just losing the data, it's having to reinstall everything that was on there, and reset all the settings etc 🤬 It just seems a lazy way forward to me. At least I have only lost recent data, all my historic data is backed up on Carbonite, albeit mostly duplicated. Carbonite say they have no way of accessing my laptop under the circumstances. Stable doors and bolting horses, but I am presently putting all the stuff from my old Dell laptop onto the external hard drive, just as a precaution in case I somehow lose the Carbonite backup. The Dell still works, just mostly very very slowly, but randomly speeds up 🤣

"The community" is all of us. Are you volunteering to take this task on?

The Oxfam shop refusal may be because they have very limited storage space at the back of their very small shop?

I have always taken mine to the main St Christopher's shop, in a bin bag clearly marked "Rags". They have always accepted them. Clean items only, obviously.

However I don't understand how I could check if the SSD is detected without being able to see anything on the screen? Or how I could run any diagnostic tools without being able to see anything on the screen?

Thanks Vladi, I will look into this.

Sorry, I don't understand? Whenever I take items to the shop I say I want gift aid added. The first time you do it, you get a card with a number on, but also they put your name, address and email address, plus the gift aid number, onto their computer records. So if you don't have the card or number with you, they can track the number from that. If you mean the notification of the amount for tax purposes, apparently you can opt how to be notified, which also goes onto that record, and which to the best of my knowledge I was never asked, hence the recent problem.

My phone doesn't show a URL for the forum at all!

OK, I have been extremely stupid. This is a long and sorry saga, so unless you are into schadenfreude, or know about laptops and might actually be able to help, you probably need to stop reading here. I got a new laptop last May, with a 2 year guarantee from John Lewis (that was my first mistake, but the laptop met all my requirements at a very good price). I hate OneDrive, and I had been using Carbonite for backing up files. When I got the new laptop, the files from my old laptop which had been backed up on Carbonite were downloaded onto it. For tedious reasons originally related to problems with my old laptop, files and folders were duplicated all over the place. Sorting this out wasn't top of my priorities. In an attempt to at least keep new files, and files edited since I bought the laptop, in one place and completely separate from all the old duplicated files, I saved them all into folders on the SSD. However, I didn't restart the Carbonite backup, because my intention was to sort out all the duplicate files first. About a fortnight ago, I bought an external hard drive. My intention was to copy everything on the new laptop onto it before I started deleting any of the duplicate files. I hadn't done that yet because I had to finish doing my accounts and then do my online tax return. So the copying was next on my To Do list. The inevitable happened. Out of the blue, my laptop went into complete meltdown. I was editing a spreadsheet and went into settings to turn the brightness up. I checked the brightness was ok on the spreadsheet, came out of settings, and suddenly everything went black. I did all the obvious things, then googled other possible fixes, including specific to my laptop model, but nothing worked. On starting the laptop, the Lenovo logo came up, the little white circle turned round, the red light for face recognition flashed, then zilch. But clearly it wasn't a problem with the physical screen, as it displayed the logo. It wouldn't start in safe mode either. I thought I might either have accidentally changed some setting, or else it might be connected with a recent update I couldn't try some of the tests suggested, eg removing RAM, because anything involving physically unscrewing my laptop would invalidate the guarantee I am a member of Which Tech, so I contacted them. Obviously their hands were rather tied as they couldn't connect remotely to the laptop as there was no display. They said I couldn't have clicked on some other setting by mistake, as the display section only related to the display. They said they thought it was probably an issue with either the operating system or the mother board, or a component of them. They said it should be possible to identify the fault without losing my data. Given the involvement of John Lewis, I said I thought this was unlikely, as they had once told me to do an unnecessary factory reset on my old laptop and told me this wouldn't lose my data, which I had queried at the time, and had to pay me compensation. So at this point I phoned John Lewis, to be told a repair would take "up to 28 working days" and no they wouldn't supply a replacement laptop during that time. I decided to take the laptop to John Lewis rather than have it collected, so their tech people could look at it first. So then the JL tech person said I must have clicked on Bitlocker by mistake and locked myself out out of the laptop. I thought this was highly unlikely. Anyway, pursuing this line of thought did not help, and she was still unable to get into it by putting in the Bitlocker code. So then we had the data saving conversation. She said the company the laptop would go to was approved by Lenovo. She said they would do a factory reset first regardless. I said could they not try to identify the fault first. She said no. I said could I not request that they did. She said no. She said I could pay £150 for data retrieval, which could be done first. She said it would require removing the hard drive. She said if anybody else did this it would invalidate the guarantee. So. I have brought the laptop home to think things over. But I'm not willing to pay £150, because the important files I can reconstruct by other means, and I have hard copies of most of them, it's just a time consuming pain. I have contacted Carbonite to see if they have any way of backing up the non backed up data even though I can't get into the laptop. If you have managed to reach the end of this post, congratulations 🤣 and do you have any bright ideas? I have typed all this on my mobile. It has taken a very very long time 🤣