In the past month, I have had my notebook in the shop to have some bad solder connections repaired in the power circuits, replaced the modem, and as of yesterday had the hard drive crash. I think it's time to put this thing out to pasture.
The hard drive is reporting "imminent failure" on boot and half the drive is now completely unusable. After the crash I was unable to reboot the drive. Everything was trashed. Now, I'm no slouch when it comes to hardware/software issues but I was unable to recover the drive in any way that I attempted.
I decided that the easiest thing to do would be to simply reformat and repartition the drive and then reinstall my OS. Well, the drive has some fatal problems. I was unable to format the entire drive (12 Gig) due to errors, so I played around until I reached a set of pertition sizes that would allow sucessful formatting. Half the drive is trashed.
It looks like just a matter of time until the whole thing will fail. Replacing the hard drive in a notebook is no simple task as these things are a bear to disassemble, unlike a desktop tower wwhich can be done in a matter of minutes.
I will keep nursing this thing along for as long as I can, and save my money toward buying a new desktop computer. I am thinking I'll spec one out through Dell that will do what I need and not cost me an arm and a leg. Notebooks are expensive and difficult to repair and since I am not traveling for a living any more I don't see the need to go to the trouble and expense of another one.
Perhaps I will eventually repair this one and keep it around as a back-up computer or for when I do take a trip some place.
I like my notebook when it's working, and really really hate it when it isn't
Technology is great.....when it works.