I’m so used to being able to fix my own computer problems it was a bit of a surprise when the – expensive – media centre PC my parents bought me for my 30th collapsed a week or so ago. Out of nowhere, it failed to boot.

The independent PC manufacturer I bought it from was unfailing in its efforts to help me troubleshoot. I was given instructions on how to remove the (clever heat-sink shaped) casing and check the cables (all fine). I ran BIOS checks myself (insofar as was possible). But there was nothing to be done – my primary hard drive had ‘vanished’ along, taking with it my Windows installation.

So it’s been shipped back to home base for maintenance. The cost of shipping, £25, is substantially less than the cost of even a small SSD of the same quality that I’d had in there, never mind the time required to rebuild the machine… but its still frustrating not to have been able to sort it myself. It’s one of the reasons I resisted Mac for all these years – I wouldn’t trust myself to take an Apple machine apart – but to its credit, at least Apple doesn’t have its sole support location in Manchester…