Lenovo and the reintroduction of switches and buttons

After my disastrous brushes with HP and Toshiba I finally bought a Lenovo laptop V330.  One problem … although the motherboard seems not to be totally messed up on this one and the component parts seem to have actually been assembled correctly … the camera appeared not to work.

After Ava Alexis had read the published manuals for several hours to very little avail as they appeared to be inaccurate or an information black hole we attempted to do a diagnostic on it and found that every time we switched the camera on through the software it switched its self off again.  So something else was conflicting and over-riding the software … after quite a bit of googleing eventually I read somewhere of a physical button on the exterior of the casing.  I couldn’t find it…

And then I looked at the camera its self … and … it is the physical switch – when you slide it left the camera’s off and when you slide it right the cameras on.  Such a shame no one thought to put this information in the manual… but then as we know computers these days are made by throwing all the items in a box as fast as possible and presumably the manuals are constructed in the same casual manner.

After this I ruminated on the mystery of buttons … and the days when it was all button and switches.  There should be more buttons.  Ideally that go click.  Our first colour television in the 1980s was the one of the first appliances to eschew buttons… having instead some kind of panel on the front that claimed to be powered by body heat but I suspected was actually activated by sweat.  Since then it’s all been downhill.  As though machines are designed to avoid even the idea that we should ever have to do as much work as pressing a button ever … when surely telling Alexa to switch your lights on and off is actually more work than pressing a switch ever could be.  And smartphone touchscreens encrusted with dead skin cells and smeared with sweat are actually pretty gross...

Of course switches wear out which is one reason manufacturers eschew them.  My dad had a music centre which after several years would crackle like the electric chair for 10 minutes after being switched on … but they were still fun.

Anyway if you too can’t cope with the fact no one bothered to put in the manual that the Lenovo V330 camera is also a button then hopefully this post will help you in keeping your hair in…