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Death of a Laptop

By: David Slonosky

Well, my old laptop has finally got to the point where I'm thinking maybe it's time to trade up to a newer model.

It's a dual boot system. Linux Mint and Windows.

On the Windows side, it wants to install XP Service Pack 3. But when I try and do that, I get the blue screen of death during the instal process.

On the Linux side, everything was going great. Until last month, when two of my word processing packages started acting wonky. CeltX, a semi-free screenwriting program started throwing segmentation faults, and Open Office started telling me there was no space in my work directory, even though there was plenty of space.

Neither boot environment has had anything weird done to it. And the Linux problem literally happened overnight.

So, I think maybe it's time to securely erase the hard drive and move on. Thanks to DropBox, any file I care about is already backed up remotely and accessible from any of my computers. Including my Palm Pre.

What's next? A netbook would do anything I wanted from a portable computer. There are rumours of a WebOS pad coming from Palm (including a leaked document). And even though I've never been for or against Apple, those Mac Airbooks look pretty sweet.

The other benefit is that any of those would weigh far less than my current beast. After all, I'm a poor feeble old man.
-- Sent from my Palm Pre

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