14/31 Every time it happens, it's a little less traumatic

[darkemeralds]

Hard drive failure is what I'm (pretty sure I'm) talking about here. This Dell Studio workhorse laptop has weathered four and a half years of my significant demands, but is finally showing signs of...something.

Remember when hard-drive failure was a major catastrophe? Now, not so much. Virtually everything I need to save is in the cloud already. Because I run Ubuntu and work primarily in web apps, I don't have any expensive software. In fact I won't swear that I have any non-free software on here at all. And if I do have to resort to professional help, getting a laptop to the shop is nothin' compared to what it would take car-free me to get an old desktop machine there.

I'm reinstalling the operating system in a few minutes. Thanks to Linux, this operation is relatively painless. Free, too. If the symptoms (terribly slowed-down response times, web-page crashes in all browsers) don't clear up with a fresh install, I'll have to start thinking (fast) about a replacement drive.

Does anyone use a solid-state drive? And if so, was it a replacement for an older HDD? How'd that go?

If worse comes to worst and I have to buy a new computer: anyone using Chromebook?

Comments

[darkemeralds]

Thanks for the update! My O/S reinstall went smoothly so I'm back in business with my four-year-old Ubuntu laptop for now. But when the hardware finally dies, I'll need to replace it with something much less expensive. If I could do 80% of what I want a computer for on a device costing less than $300, that would be amazing.

I was finding Google's own photo editing on G+ perfectly good for everything except artistic icon-making, but it suddenly stopped working in my version of Chrome--did it ever come back on your Chromebook?

Mostly, as I've gone from a high-powered Windows machine to Ubuntu + tablet + Android phone, the things I can no longer do (detailed photoshopping being the main example) just kind of dropped away. Maybe the same would happen with the switch to Chromebook.

I guess with Chromecast, the HDMI port is no longer necessary--or I'm betting that's the idea. Are you getting use out of your Chromecast?