My computer monitor has just made a pitiful fizzing noise and died. Right now I am writing on my laptop. Which actually works very nicely as a desktop especially now I've plugged the keyboard and mouse from my desktop into it and propped the laptop up so it's on a reasonable level with my eyes... and it's faster than my desktop... so everything would be hunkydory, *if* I had synched my laptop and desktop say, ever. So I have no access to my e-mails, by which I mean the stored ones and the ones I'd downloaded but not read yet, my diary, all the info about the trips I am going on to Germany in two weeks and Uganda in three weeks and, oh yeah, Warwick tomorrow, and so on, and indeed so forth. The clever thing to do will be to plug my desktop into something else, say my TV (??? with what lead??????) and then get everything over onto my laptop and forget my desktop ever existed. But in the meantime, if you have tried to contact me today, or we are supposed to be meeting up but I never turn up, etc, please bear with me. I am nothing without my electronic devices...
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You should be able to connect your laptop to your desktop machine, either via the network or directly, and try to copy off the data you need.
Thanks Nick. I can't find my firewire - may have been a casualty of the house move - and when I try to connect remotely I just get a message saying something like 'you cannot access the alias Marie Phillips's Computer because the original cannot be found.' Both computers ar switched on, but I can't figure out if anything weird is happening at the desktop end because... well see above. Any other thoughts?
Is your desktop a Mac Mini? I think you'll need an adaptor for that - probably a DVI to TV adaptor, but it depends on which Mac Mini you have and what TV you've got - cf http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2391?viewlocale=en_US
Otherwise, Firewire is your best bet as you suggest.
After that, it depends what your settings are. You'd have needed to have had File Sharing enabled to be able to network the two together and grab your files (are you doing that wirelessly?) and yout two computers would need to have different names (so if they're both called Marie Phillips's computer, there'll be a conflict and you'll need to rename your laptop in the Sharing pane of the System Preferences).
This may sound obvious, but flat screen monitors are really cheap nowadays (or, at least, they were the last time I looked). I suspect that there is nothing like enough resolution in your TV to be able to use it as a monitor. In addition, you would need a monitor to set it up.
Once you have a monitor, and have rescued your files you can still use it with your laptop.
Also, your mail service will almost certainly have a WebMail interface on their website somewhere. I've pretty much given up using a dedicated email client - the web ones are so good now and I can access all my emails from anywhere at anytime.
Depends on whether your service is POP3 or IMAP (I think) - if the latter, your emails will still on the servers and so you can access them via the Web interface. Even if POP3, I think suppliers can configure their servers to keep mails on the server. Not entirely sure.
Chances are, though, since you mentioned downloading your emails, that you won't be on IMAP, you'll be on POP which means you can't use the web interface to view them since they'll only be on your Mac - while the end user can specify in their email client that they want to leave messages on the server, the ISP won't do that - and probably won't even offer the option - since they don't want to have to store all those emails.
This is one of those things that's much easier to sort out if you're physically present. I'd recommend getting a techie friend to pop round and take a look.
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