I’m writing this from my new laptop.
That alone is something I haven’t said in a very long time. But time marches on, and so does technology. What once was more than enough power has since become anemic, to the point where even simple web browsing was mostly impossible on the old machine. For the last five years, I’d used it less and less, until it became nothing more than a second screen for taking notes. Even that was only for work and my Otherworld series, the only one whose vast body of notes I hadn’t moved.
But it was a good little machine. I’ll give it that. When I bought it in 2007, I didn’t expect it to still be kicking 15 years later. In fact, it almost didn’t. At the time, Ubuntu had a major bug in the way it handled laptop hard drives. Rather than bore you with technical details that are boring and completely pointless in this day of SSDs, I’ll just say this: it was killing them by default. Fortunately, I found out before too much damage had been done. The “load cycle count” rating on the drive capped at 200,000; at that point, it was even money whether it would fail. After 4 months, mine sat at almost 160,000. Today, it’s around 167,000, so maybe there’s a little life left.
The specs, on the other hand, mean that life wouldn’t be a good one. A 100 GB hard drive, “only” 1 GB of memory, and no actual video card to speak of? That’s not much to go on these days, especially when the new system is sitting at 1.7 GB used for just the desktop, a file manager, and a single browser window. I’m into retro, though, so maybe I’ll try to do something with it.
The only constant is change. I hate to see the old machine go, and I know upgrades aren’t always for the best, but I hope this one will allow me to become more mobile again.