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Macbook Withdrawal Syndrome – Thinspace comes to rescue

My faithful MacBook Pro, which has been running every day since April 2008 suddenly stopped functioning yesterday morning, and I have been suffering from withdrawal symptoms ever since.

I debated on whether to buy a new laptop, the entry product with 4GB RAM would have been £500 more than the repair cost, but decided to replace the faulty motherboard instead, so that I would not need to go through the hassle of installing new software and moving large amount of data.

Strangely, you cannot order spare parts for Macs either on Sunday or Monday in the UK. Any hope of getting my MacBook Pro repaired quickly is not an option anymore.

In the mean time, Techcelerate Member, Thinspace came to the rescue with a thinclient. Unfortunately, this means I have to carry a monitor, keyboard and a mouse with me, which is not practical by any means.

I also forgot to get the thinclient configured for accepting flash and silverlight, which means I cannot read any documents on edocr.com, nor can address many applications such as graphs on xero.com or youtube videos.

I am a great believer of crisises leading to opportunities. I have been an avid evangelist of SaaS well before the mainstream, but never adopted it 100%, so I see this as my opportunity to finally move to the web as close to 100% as possible.

I will be keen to understand what tools you use if you have also adopted a similar strategy. Listed below are some of the tools I use:

  • email: Google (personal + edocr + techcelerate with auto forward) – I love how iMail brought all of my emails to one user interface. Know of any email dashboard I could use? By the way, I am still not thrilled with google email user interface
  • Spreadsheets: Google Docs and Microsoft Excel – Time to ditch Excel
  • Wordprocessing: Google Docs and Microsoft Word – not sure Google Docs is advanced enough for reports – but appreciate its time to move on
  • Presentations: Google Docs and Microsoft Powerpoint – Love powepoint – was not impressed with Google Docs – hard decision here
  • To Do List – iGTD – trialling with tadalist.com – not impressed
  • CRM – salesforce.com (edocr) and capsulecrm.com (techcelerate)
  • Accounts – xero.com (edocr and techcelerate)
  • Personal finance – spreadsheets – time to give mint.com a try
  • Contacts – gist.com and plaxo.com but address book on Mac had over 7000 contacts (perhaps not transferrable online)
  • Huddle.net – project collaboration

Of course, above is only some of the apps I use.

Published inedocr.com