The patchwork machine unravelled

On Friday night, I booted up the computer and it sounded a bit sick. It has gradually been falling to pieces and I’ve had to stick bits of it together with whatever I could find. The noise on Friday night sounded terminal.

And it was terminal.

Saturday morning found it unresponsive to any outside stimuli. The screen was showing my wallpaper and the five shortcuts I limit myself to, but the mouse wouldn’t move and the keyboard just clunked, causing nothing to happen.

I pulled the plug and tried giving it a few hundred volts in an attempt to revive its flagging heart. It didn’t work. Apart from the external drives starting up, there was nothing. No hard drive noise, no hacking and coughing, nada.

The covers have been off for a few weeks because I’ve had to add and subtract bits of hardware to ensure its continued operation so I had a bit of a poke around, pushing and pulling and generally acting like a doctor out of his depth. Nothing worked. The patient had passed on to a better, less mechanically dominant world.

I murmured a hushed farewell as I pulled the plug for good. It was a very sad moment and, out of respect, I waited a few minutes before hooking up my netbook and searching online for a replacement.

And it’s been a tough decision but I’m finally going to go for a laptop rather than the clunky old school tower PC. This decision was helped by the fact that a budget model I found was twice as powerful as my recently deceased friend. And cheaper.

Computing was once the home of big, powerful looking boxes with flashing lights and mysterious slots to be filled. A world where hard drive size was measured in megabits and were too big to carry around. Things have now changed.

It’s now all smaller, lighter, faster, portable. And I’m going to buy into this new age…finally.

But, back to the old PC…I am very pleased to say that I have lost nothing, all my data is not just backed up but also sits on external hard drives which work perfectly well on anything with a USB connection. For this I am very grateful. If this were not the case, I would have lost everything. So I guess my life in IT has given me something of great value.

And so, I will now need to order my new companion. Until then, there will be no updates to the website (apart from the blog) or particularly good image manipulation. There will also probably not be any new photo albums. All of these things require the greater grunt of a desktop machine and would possibly kill my poor (but lovely) little netbook.