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. =)