My crumbling world

My psion series 5mx palmtop computer finally popped its clogs this weekend. It seems that it has fallen victim to the dreaded ribbon cable problem which basically means the screen no longer works. This is not a fault that I can work around.

For those of you that do not know, the psion series 5mx is a brilliantly designed machine that went out of production some time back. The collection of features that it delivers make it unbeatable, even though it is a bit long in the tooth. It has a full office suite, diary, contacts, text editors, sketching software, voice recording, touch sensitive screen, alarms, database management system, games, spell checker, thesaurus, calculator, a port for an additional flash card, email (not that I use it), and a web browser (ditto) and a brilliant operating system called Epoch. That’s just out of the box. You can also install oodles of third party software.

Its two best features, however, are its astonishingly good slide out keyboard and its ability to turn on instantly. You really do have to see and use that keyboard to know what I mean. It’s fantastic.

So I really don’t have a choice but to get it repaired at a cost of around £80 plus postage. Shame, because I would much rather put that money towards a newer better machine but I can't because no such machine exists. Except, perhaps, the psion series 7 but that falls a little outside of the palmtop size range and is also no longer made.

Ernest provides a link to this, Perfect guide to disassemble Psion 5mx. Lots of pictures.

Alternatively I could use this guy who seems to offer a reasonable deal at £45 job done.