The Ink-Pot and the Palette

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?

This computer! It has so much SCREEN OMG. And the keyboard! It lights up! But not too much, just enough to find the unusual keys in a dark room.

And it has a fingerprint reader, an add-on that I thought lame until serenity_valley demonstrated why I needed it--because instead of typing in a password you just rub your fingertip over the little indentation. Shut up. There's nothing untoward about it.

I still haven't figured out the problem with Vista, because so far it's just like XP only slightly flashier, and is giving me no grief at all.

So, in short, I am a very happy Dell customer, and you don't know how old and crappy your old and crappy computer was till someone steals it and forces you to get a new one.

Six. That's how many computers I've had.

My first one was a loaner from a friend. It had no hard drive, let alone a modem. There was no internet yet to connect to, and the BBS world was a shadowy place where girls like me didn't go, but even so, inside that box, behind that screen, was this whole amazing world of potential: I wrote my first novel on that computer. It was 1989.

The modem came with a Windows 3 desktop that my dad bought in a fit of early adopterhood then gave to me in a subsequent fit of technophobia. I spent a lot of my time on Prodigy, and then on the real internet, and I thought, as I have thought almost every day since, "This! This is why I was born in the late 20th century!"

I built my next one--fried the first motherboard instantly, but eventually got it working. I wrote my first HTML on it and designed my first web pages. It served me for at least three years before spam, viruses and Windows 98 SE operating system obsolescence finally converged to kill it.

That was when I made the leap, all at once, to cable broadband, wireless, a laptop, and a cellular phone. I bought a factory-refurbished Dell Inspiron running Windows XP, a nine-pound behemoth whose screen brightness and clarity I have yet to better (though if FedEx ever gets here, I think I'm about to).

A refurbished Gateway convertible running Windows XP Tablet Edition that I got cheap on uBid (thank you and rest in peace, rosheen) as a travel computer, was pressed into main-computer duty when the Dell hard drive failed. Gateway Tablet served me pretty faithfully until Mr Burglar relieved me of it last week.

I'm bridging the gap with this little Samsung french-fry computer--again, bought for travel purposes. It is, I just realized, the first brand-new, ready-out-of-the-box computer I've ever owned.

Any minute now (tapping foot impatiently), FedEx is gonna bring me the second one, Computer Number Seven, a Dell Studio running Vista. With a BluRay drive! And 8GB of RAM.

Any minute now...

Monsoon came back today from his long (but very comfortable) exile at my mother's house, and after a bit of a pout in the basement, seemed very glad to be home.

My Serenity DVD arrived this afternoon, and I'm going to make a new Christmas Eve tradition of watching it. With a shot of Laphroaig. And maybe some cake.

( I hope all my LJ friends are enjoying as pleasant a holiday as I am. )

Okay, I'm cracking my bottle of Laphroaig and cueing up the DVD.

Merry Christmas, everybody.