12 July 2007
Death of a Laptop
Yes, indeed, my old and trusty Toshiba Satellite laptop died recently. I am now writing this from my brand spanking new Toshiba Tecra.
The Satellite was already starting to hiccup a bit due to a dying FL inverter. I merely....er....hastened it along, shall we say, by having a double mishap. I tend to use my laptop at work a lot since it has Apache, MySQL, and PHP on it. And, no, the computer at work doesn't - long story which doesn't need to be told now.
At any rate, so I was working away at some code and someone called for my attention, so like an idiot I scooted my chair away from the desk without first making sure of the location of the computer power cord. There was this thud and I looked back at my desk to see the laptop on the floor, swooning. The monitor had flopped down to "fully open" - essentially parallel to the floor. The DVD drive drawer had popped out. Arrrrgh.
I pushed the DVD drive drawer back in, fiddled with the computer for a bit, and concluded it had survived. So I resumed my usual computing.
Only to repeat the same exact procedure two days later.
*bang head on desk*
That was too much for the hard drive. It didn't break...exactly. It started acting its age, though, and had a tantrum and refused to work as fast as before.
That, combined with the monitor issues, was enough of that. I ordered a new computer Monday of last week and got it Friday of last week. I've since then been busy catching up with all the things I needed the laptop to do. Fortunately, the old laptop is still working - somewhat and under severe protest, but working - so I was able to hook it to the monitor of the desktop (yes, the FL inverter finally and completely died) and get my data off of it.
Big sigh of relief.
I do have backups, but it had been a little while since I'd done one due to hecticness on the home front what with the house buying process. Things had been busy at work so I did have quite a bit of un-backed-up stuff. If I had lost that stuff, it would have bitten the big one.
HOUSE UPDATE:
We've closed on the house and will be moving in a few days. Once things are settled down on the home front, I'll have more time to write. I'm still managing to get a few hundred words a day done - not really that much on a day-to-day basis but in the grand scheme of things it's good because I'm trying hard not to break the habit of writing something every day and so far so good.
The Satellite was already starting to hiccup a bit due to a dying FL inverter. I merely....er....hastened it along, shall we say, by having a double mishap. I tend to use my laptop at work a lot since it has Apache, MySQL, and PHP on it. And, no, the computer at work doesn't - long story which doesn't need to be told now.
At any rate, so I was working away at some code and someone called for my attention, so like an idiot I scooted my chair away from the desk without first making sure of the location of the computer power cord. There was this thud and I looked back at my desk to see the laptop on the floor, swooning. The monitor had flopped down to "fully open" - essentially parallel to the floor. The DVD drive drawer had popped out. Arrrrgh.
I pushed the DVD drive drawer back in, fiddled with the computer for a bit, and concluded it had survived. So I resumed my usual computing.
Only to repeat the same exact procedure two days later.
*bang head on desk*
That was too much for the hard drive. It didn't break...exactly. It started acting its age, though, and had a tantrum and refused to work as fast as before.
That, combined with the monitor issues, was enough of that. I ordered a new computer Monday of last week and got it Friday of last week. I've since then been busy catching up with all the things I needed the laptop to do. Fortunately, the old laptop is still working - somewhat and under severe protest, but working - so I was able to hook it to the monitor of the desktop (yes, the FL inverter finally and completely died) and get my data off of it.
Big sigh of relief.
I do have backups, but it had been a little while since I'd done one due to hecticness on the home front what with the house buying process. Things had been busy at work so I did have quite a bit of un-backed-up stuff. If I had lost that stuff, it would have bitten the big one.
HOUSE UPDATE:
We've closed on the house and will be moving in a few days. Once things are settled down on the home front, I'll have more time to write. I'm still managing to get a few hundred words a day done - not really that much on a day-to-day basis but in the grand scheme of things it's good because I'm trying hard not to break the habit of writing something every day and so far so good.
