The saga of my PC woes continues.
But there may be a happy ending in my future!
For those of you unfamiliar with the story so far, my laptop died last week and I have not been able to get out and get a new one yet. So, to make it possible to check email and to post on WordPress, I pulled an old, outdated laptop out of my “junk closet” and fired it up.
It’s operation leaves a lot to be desired.
I am willing to make allowances for many of its shortcomings since it was a product of its time (the early 2000s).
I am okay with
- The fact that it weighs as much as a cinder block
- The low resolution screen (my eyes are not that good anyway).
- The relatively slow performance (I’m just using it for a glorified typewriter anyway).
- The fact that I can roast marshmallows by holding them up to the cooling fan port on the side.
However, I could not live with the fact that it locked up every 30 minutes or so because it was not good at multi-tasking. I know, I know! This is certainly a case of the pot calling the kettle black since I have the exact same problem. But this is nearly unforgivable in a laptop.
So, I did what any semi-quick thinking quasi-slacker would do who happened to have a junk closet full of old laptops.
I opened up the defunct laptops one at a time until I found one of them that had the same sort of memory that this laptop requires. Long story short, I upgraded the RAM in this laptop from 2 Gb to 4 Gb. It now seems to be running much, MUCH better.
It remains to be seen if it locks up later when I open up a 3rd window to watch music videos.
Or if I lock up when I try to read blogs and listen to music at the same time.
Ah, SSD’s. A couple years back I had a laptop that was starting to act up and couldn’t figure out how to make it behave, so I took it into a shop. Their opinion was the hard drive was on its last spins, and the best bet was to replace it with an SSD. So, I had ’em do it (I’m not that mechanical) and transfer the data.
Fast forward a year or so, and the laptop starts acting up again (probably power connection), the battery is near dead, and I’m thinking “this is a 7 year old laptop, maybe it’s time to upgrade”. So I did that too, but while it has a smaller SSD for the OS and sundry, the main storage is a HDD. And my old laptop has a full size SSD, and even better it’s already has all my data and programs loaded and organized.
Now it’s back to the shop. “Can you do a heart transplant – swap the drives for the two laptops?” And they did!
So now the main beast is all SSD, the old one has a new HDD (and a new battery). Both are a little confused as to what brand they are. I use the old one primarily as a backup, just in case…
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I thought about replacing my HDD with a SSD, but the price-per-Gigabyte is still a little more than I care to spend. Sometimes I hate being a cheapskate. I will replace my failed HDD with another one.
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V true Anne, It is almost worth selling off the firstborn to get a solid state one!
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I got an appraisal on my first born and the best I could get was an external 3.5 inch floppy drive.
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For a minute there, I thought you were going to do a fund raiser for a computer.
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I would have, but I can’t even hardly get people to read my blog for free. I can only imagine what would happen to my readership if I started asking for money!
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You are already on thin ice and now THAT idea is floating around in your head? I have a finger hovering over the Unfollow button.
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Thanks, Wilt! Not only did you prove my point, but you help keep me grounded. Wait … did I just get grounded? What the heck is going on here?
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Four Gigabytes??? Welcome to 2009, grandpa!
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[waves my cane angrily in the air] You kids get off my lawn! You young whippersnappers, with your DDR4 memory and your overclocked CPUs and your 4K displays! Back in my day we only had one memory bit … and we had to share it with the neighbors. We had to take turns deciding whether we were going to store a ‘one’ or a ‘zero’. Our display was a stick and some dirt. [wanders off muttering to myself]
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I’ve been called a “Luddite” from some of the younger people where I work…
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We should start a club! I have been a Luddite for years, which is ironic given that I work in the high tech field.
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My boss gets uncomfortable when I point out that irony…
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Bosses tend to get uncomfortable when anything at all is pointed out to them. It shatters their desire for plausible deniability.
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Oh, those damn first world problems
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Yes indeed! I understand there are people in other countries who only have 2 GB of RAM. We really should do something about that!
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We manage to get a lot of extra life on our computers at work by upgrading to the Solid State Drives (SSD). They definitely improve performance. Good luck!
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I think I will give that a try. Everyone seems to universally love SSD’s. Thanks for the tip!
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