Well, this isn’t good.

My laptop died on Friday.  I put it to sleep and put it in my bookbag, like I do every day.  Took it to work, and it sat under my desk all day.  Got home, tried to wake it up.  No graphics.  Didn’t even get a signal on the VGA out or S-Video connector.

I managed to get the hard drive out and cloned to my desktop, so at least the data is salvaged, and rules out the possibility of a hard drive malfunction (like it ever could have been).  It’s now sitting at the local Intrex shop for the final word on whether or not its salvageable.  I doubt that it is, but remain ever so hopeful.  Perhaps a connector came loose, and that’s all it takes.

I got 2 good years out of it.  When I bought it, it wasn’t through a major outlet.  It was through ibuypower.com.  It was a strong system, especially for the price.  Sadly, it only carried a 6 month warranty.

Unfortunately, I won’t be getting a new laptop anytime soon.  I really don’t need one, as I’ve got my desktop, which just received a major overhaul 3 months ago (new motherboard, memory, processor).  I’ve got my 7 year old laptop sitting here for “light” duty (web browsing) when I don’t want to power up my desktop.  It’s funny, it’s got a 1.2ghz AMD Turion processor, 20gb hard drive, and 256MB of memory.  Talk about ancient.  But it operates, and draws a ton less power than my desktop.

If I do wind up getting a new laptop, I’ll probably go back to Dell.  While I won’t for a desktop system, the laptop makes sense.  Everything on there is so customized.  The warranty is useful in case something like that happens again.  I’m considering a netbook, but those really have about as much power as the laptop sitting out here now. And the tiny TINY screens…

I’d like to hear some feedback from anyone that’s got a netbook.  Might help sway my decision a bit.  =)