Computer's Carbon Footprint Nearly

My husband is not impressed with my fanatical recycling policy. Plastic, glass, aluminium, newspapers – all separated and lovingly put out in the blue boxes/bags. We’ve even got our very own composter for the garden waste. So I’m pretty pleased with myself doing my bit for Global Warming and the Carbon Footprint. My husband’s argument is – I do all this and then… leave the computer on 24/7. He has got a point but I have a wonderful relationship with my PC. You could say a typical love/hate. I love it. It hates me.

I’ve gone back to the PC quite often recently and it’s been switched off. Of course I blamed my husband doing his bit for the environment. He denied all knowledge so then Morgan got the blame and as he’s too young to confirm or deny. It was left at that until this week.

So there I’d be emailing away job applications and it would switch off. Extremely annoying to say the least.

When I bought it, about a million years ago I took out this protection thingy but I couldn’t find the receipt. I rang PC World and after about a million options got through to a very nice man who traced me by my post code (Big Brother is watching, scary really.)

I explained the problem and he got me to go into the BIOS and he asked me to read off the temperature. “113.5C.”

The poor man screamed down the phone “Hit the power switch! Turn off your machine! Hit the power button! NOW!!”

He went on to explain that how the internals of my machine hadn’t been frazzled and caused a house fire he had no idea and went on to arrange for a very nice engineer to come out yesterday.

Well the very nice man did come out and diagnosed the problem immediately. Dust. I was absolutely mortified . A family of mice could quite happily have lived there very comfortably, thank you very much. I asked how it could be avoided and thankfully he said it couldn’t and this was “Normal”. He worked his magic with his paintbrush and my Dyson and I’m now left with a machine that’s running sweet as a nut.

He also reminded me that with this insurance there’s a free annual health check – I think I’ll be taking full advantage of this in the future. I read this week about a laptop being left on and setting fire to a settee. There’s a global warning in this house now – SWITCH OFF.