I purchased our Thinkpad exactly 3 years ago this week. It has been a great computer, but barely operable over the last six months or so. Sluggish as all get out (2-3 minutes to start Internet Explorer), DVD's in the optical drive not working after several attempts to update the driver, error messages on startup, always fighting to keep the last 2 gigs of hard drive space free, the list goes on.
Since laptops generally have a three-year life span, we talked about buying a new computer for the holidays, but ended up putting it off. Finally this month, I've been contemplating the economy and thinking about the need to re-use, conserve, and generally cut back. So I decided today to wipe the hard drive clean (backing up the essential files, of course) and perform a fresh install of XP.
A few hours later and this thing is humming like new, perhaps better than new. I was able to erase IBM's factory-created hard drive partition, freeing up an extra 7 gigs or so of space. Magically, DVD's now work in the optical drive. I custom installed my Windows Service Packs and Updates so that I am only running the essential. Only 4 items in the system tray! No nagging IBM utilities.
Some LCD screen cleaner, a good pass over the keyboard and other nooks and crannies with the precision attachments on the vacuum / blower that dad got us for Christmas, and it's like I just took this thing out of the box.
It's amazing what people put up with in Windows. And the general lack of knowledge and fear people have of wiping their machines clean and performing a reinstall. I used to do this for work, but I was considerably intimidated nonethless. Poppycock! In fact, why didn't I do this sooner?
A question--what other ways has the economy influenced you to cut back, conserve, reuse, or generally prepare?
In our case, we were pretty close to buying a car last year but talked ourselves out of it in the fall. I'm very glad now. If, like the Thinkpad, we can keep our cars running through the recession, all the better.
Notes from the ApostaCon
4 hours ago
1 comments:
You may want to consider this as a response to the economy: that's a marketable skill you have there. Your friends and relatives would probably pay for that to be done to their computers - I know I would, if it was someone I trusted not to totally hose things up. At this moment I have no less than 3 laptops sitting in a drawer of my desk that are there because they got so gunked up that it seemed easier just to transfer My Docs and my music files to a new unit and start over.
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