I don’t believe it was so simple

September 21, 2012 by Carole 7 Comments

For years my laptop has been driving me insane. It has a couple of little quirks and one of them was so bad that I was on the verge of replacing the laptop even though I can't actually afford to. It was that bad. I do a lot of typing on it. Maybe not a lot compared to some people, but enough so that when the laptop keeps going into deep sleep mode every other time I touch the keyboard, it's very annoying.

It was worse if I wanted to use the number keys at the back. It really hated me to use those. Sometimes, I didn't even have to touch them. I only needed to attempt to type and it would turn off. It's taken me five attempts to type an ISBN or my email address before now. And I can type my email address really fast now. I've had to learn to in order to beat the sleepy keyboard.

Today I had to search around for car insurance quotes. This means typing in lots of information on lots of different websites. And, it means using the number keys. I was pretty sure if I tried this on my laptop, I'd be pulling my hair out within half an hour. I could have used the desktop – Old Clunky – but as his name suggests, he's old and slow and would take so long that my insurance would probably have expired before I'd found a suitable quote.

So, I did the only sensible thing. I nicked Stephen's laptop. It's not perfect. It runs Windows 7, which I don't like. This is probably because mine runs Vista, Old Clunky runs XP, and I can't be bothered to learn yet another system. So I dislike it on principle. Also, he has no mouse and I really dislike using the swishy pad thingy. It's just so inconvenient. Pah.

It does however stay on when you're typing. Or, I thought it did. An hour into the intensive searching and it started to turn itself off whenever I typed. I wasn't impressed. It was actually worse than mine.

Something needed to be done here. I consulted Google and found out that lots of other people had exactly the same problem with their Dell laptops. Ah ha! There was one thing that we all had in common. We all wore magnetic bracelets. So this meant that…

My laptop kept turning itself off when I typed, because of my magnetic bracelet.

I feel the need to say that again.

My laptop kept turning itself off when I typed, because of my magnetic bracelet.

It was that flamin' simple. Years of frustration because the lid of the laptop has a magnetic catch. When the base of the laptop senses a magnet, it thinks the lid is closed and it goes into deep sleep. The catch is just where your right wrist sits when you touch type, and if the bracelet is loose and is further down your wrist, it doesn't catch there until you reach for the numbers.

Isn't it so obvious once you know?

The solution is to go into the control panel and alter the settings so that it does nothing when the lid is closed. It appears to be fixed now as I've typed all of this and it's been fine. Years of frustration over a bracelet.

All I need to do now then, is find out why this laptop sometimes decides it can't 'see' the router. If the problem is as glaringly obvious and simple as the other one, I should be laughing, eh?