MTBF is an acronym for Mean Time Between Failures. Whenever you buy something like a computer or a car, or buy into something like a marriage, there is an average (mean) time when the product or the relationship goes south.
In my case, my 3 year old Dell AlienWare laptop went south 2 days ago with very little warning except for a slowing down which I attributed to Windows bloat. I have always said electronic equipment seems to have a MTBF of about 3 years. My Samsung 34 inch monitor crapped out at 2 years, 10 months while my AlienWare laptop was almost 3 years to the day as it was purchased on December 15th 2015.
Now I program on my laptop and when it died, my immediate concern was how much time is this going to cost me, what have I lost, and what is my latest backup and where did I store it? I have backups on the same device, on portable ssd drives, and in the cloud on our servers.
After much searching I found the most valuable backups of my various vmWare images on one of my portable SSD drives and it was current. My current work, still in development was on two different servers in the AWS cloud so I was good to go.
My Documents were another story as I am not as good at backing up my person stuff. After much trying I was able to open a CMD prompt and go spelunking on the laptop's SSD drive. I quickly found out that some directories and files had disappeared but I was able to copy over some needed documents a bit oat a time because the computer would crap out and reboot 3 times if tried to much. I suspect that some memory had gone bad.
I managed to get my backup laptop up and running with my latest apps and vmWare images after a day of hard work installing the latest of everything as that laptop, a Lenova ThinkPad is 6 years old. Turns out my older laptop was running better than than the 3 year old AlienWare. ThinkPads are great, especially with their spill proof keyboards that I have had experience to test.
I will be buying a new ThinkPad and staying away from Dell in the future as this is the second Dell laptop I have had with issues.
One item I always avoid is Bilingual keyboards whether they be French (bad) or Thai (worse). The replacement laptop is highly recommended on the internet by just about all reviewers, except Mac pundits.
TTYL
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