the slowly dying laptop
Yeah, my Fujitsu laptop has been dying for a year or so, it's had surgery for power, batteries, hard drive, sound, etc, it's lost every bit that could break off and still have a usable laptop (all the suede on the bottom, the lid fasteners, the pcmcia blcker, the case around the base of the lid.. the still working pcmcia eject button is my one remaining sacrificial breaky bit). It's got the marks to prove cats love it, along with all the results of throwing it in my book bag and taking off with no concern for carrying a laptop around. The screen has 4 or 5 dead pixels and recently one faint patial dead scan line. The lid is getting worryingly wobbly. The CD drive was once crushed in an airplane and then banged back into shape so it still fits in the machine and even ejects OK. I've rubbed the letters right off some of the keys on the keyboard. The speakers turned black and exuded some glue or something long ago during a hot summer, one of them is barely audible. The headphone jack broke. Oh and the laptop is also abused regularly by programs like firefox and openoffice that really didn't expect to run on a 900 mhz crusoe.
All that, I can live with. The laptop bears its marks with pride, and amazingly, people still occasionally ooh and awe at it. Although more likely from a bit of a distance these days.
The newest wrinkle is that I'm beginning to exceed the design specs for the keyboard. Apparently they just didn't design for it to be used so much. First some keys stopped working half the time on some days, yeilding the famous irc sessions where joeyh tlks without ny A's. Then the Function key's membrane stopped pushing it back up, so it always appears pressed, though still works. Now the Alt key is going the same route and the right side ofthespacebardoesn't work, leadingtoircsessions whereItalklike this. And it just feels like I can't touch type on it half the time anymore.
A new keyboard is $100 or more. I think it's time to retire this to a d-i test machine and start looking for a new latop.
I looked at the IBM X-41 again, really like it, but still can't get past the low res display and fan. Especially with some reports that the fan runs constantly in linux. I looked at all the stuff on dynamism, but wasn't impressed enough to consider it. At the moment the Fujitsu P7120 is looking mighty appealing. Hey, it's even got the suede bottom again. And no fan.. Only problem is it has a touchpad.