Another Computer Down

So Saturday night my internet computer went down with a hard drive crash. Luckily I have it partitioned in such a way that I didn’t lose any data. Kinda funny it happens just a week or two after my music computer crapped out. Anyway, I’m trying to decide on trying to fix it or getting a new machine or both. The machine is seven years old & it’s lived a hard life (going on tour isn’t great for a laptop, not I imagine is bringing it to a dirty old warehouse to work on during lunchbreaks for 4 years) & has been dropped a few times so the CD drive doesn’t work & it developed an over heating problem (solved with one of those cooling fan things to set laptops on, but I was told the overheating issue may have contributed to the hard drive problems) & of course the battery doesn’t work anymore & it has a replacement power supply that makes the audio inputs really noisy (not the jacks, but the actual signal has a loud noisefloor that wasn’t there with the original power supply). Still I love that machine & hope to get it back working, but if I need to re-install windows from scratch & re-install all of the software I feel I maybe should do that on a new machine instead of waiting for the next catastrophe on the old machine (the power brick going bad again would be $100 & it seems possible). But it is funny that seven years later that machine has the same processor speed & RAM as a lot of the budget machines today instead of just being totally obsolete. I have nothing bad to say about it especially given the fact everyone I know seems to have just switched out to at least their third machine since then. My sister loaned me this netbook for the week for checking orders & such (I always get confused when people have computers without the programs I need to work on them – no Excel, Word, Pagemaker, or Sound Forge? sigh) & I can tell you that I will miss the matte screen from my laptop as I think the idea of making screens that you could look at & work on all day instead of these modern shiny glass ones that burn your eyeballs went out somewhere along the way. So I’ve been spending the past two days trying to repair my computer & writing some comic scripts, so at least I should have something positive come out of the whole scenario. Maybe also finally write some more reviews for the Nostalgia & Checking It Out blogs. So I’ll smell you all later.