Next week I will be presenting Entity Framework 4 at TechEd Europe. At least that is what I hope to do. However my Lenovo T61P seems to have some other plans.

• A year back the screen packed in. The nice IBM man replaced it. All was well.
• Last week the screen packed in again. The nice IBM man replaced it. All was well … with the screen.

However since then I am getting blue screens (whenever I really don’t want them) and drive errors and the odd bit of corruption of files. I need to flatten – but now is not the time.

As it happens my demos rely on a large file (a 14GB Virtual Machine) and on not blue screening.

I therefore needed a Plan B. The ideal Plan B would be a second reliable notebook. But that isn’t an option.

Therefore I have settled on:

• Keeping my fingers crossed
• Taking the VM on an external drive and have asked for a spare demo machine at the event. But I am on at 9am and fly in 9:30pm the eve before. Not ideal.
• Capturing 90% of my demos as screen shots in a ppt (which i liked as a least the effort would also be useful for some future EF 4 blog posts)

I have uploaded the demo slides on slideshare. They have been highlighted with “digital ink” in places which slideshare appears not to cope with. But the file should be fine if you download it.