Margo's Laptop, RIP

Last night Margo started getting BSODs (Blue Screens of Death) on her computer. This morning I ran chkdsk and it found an orphaned file from the Avast anti-virus product. We uninstalled this but still got blue screens. I ran a chkdsk with all options on startup, and we still got them afterwards.

I suspect her hard disk is failing. For most of its life, her computer has been woefully short of memory. In normal use it took many minutes to boot, and the disk drive would be cranking away for just about any substantial tasks as memory was swapped to disk. So with all that constant disk activity, I'm not terribly surprised that it's finally showing signs of stress. We finally increased its memory severalfold a few weeks ago in conjunction with new software Margo was installing for school, and it seemed all was well until last night. At any rate, it appears the disk, OS, or both are corrupted to the point that it is no longer usable. Margo has lots of school work on her plate and requires a reliable computer.

So today we made a trip to Future Shop to make an unscheduled upgrade. She is now setting up a new Compaq laptop, and I am partitioning and formatting a terabyte drive we got for backups at the same time. Her computing needs should be well served for the next several years.

But her old Dell has served us well. It's gotten her through years of graduate school. Many gigabytes of research articles have flowed through its browser, and hundreds of pages have been written with its software.

And its list of wireless networks reads like a travelogue of European hotels and bed-and-breakfasts. It's been hauled into overhead luggage racks on many a train and plane. It's let us process pictures from our cameras and keep writing blogs on our travels. It's even served as a DVD cinema and as an iTunes music jukebox.

Its future is yet to be decided. I may put Ubuntu Linux on it and set it up for Sarah's use. Or we might wipe it and donate it to a nonprofit. But it has met our needs nicely the last few years, and we salute it.