I had a laptop that decided that a shower was not in it’s best interests. Specifically it does not start up properly now. OK, it does not start up now. forget properly.
The situation of the computer’s demise is that I was at a concom meeting, and was doing some work off in a corner while other people were working on a separate project near where I had initially set up. Along the way someone tipped over a pitcher of water, and some splashed onto a laptop I had brought with me.
Now before anyone starts wondering if I chewed out the people who had done the spilling, I didn’t actually see the event, so I honestly don’t know who would be at fault. Additionally I specifically purchased the hardware with the understanding that should it fail, disapear, or otherwise, I would not lose what I would consider a significant investment. The computer itself is less than my renter’s insurance deductable, and I wouldn’t spend that much to get it fixed.
That said, I poped the hard drive out of the computer, as well as one of the 2 1 Gig sodimm modules, and purchased a Lenovo 3000 laptop for $400. Poped the drive and memory into the laptop, and It booted right up. The only thing I had to change was to tell the sound system that it was running on a Lenovo laptop. Everything else ran without a problem.
You say that’s not possible? Windows can’t handle that many simultanious changes to the underlying platform, there’s a new processor, video card, network mac addresses, sound card, etc. and if you change all that at once, Windows complains that you’ve copied the system to a separate computer, and you have to go through getting the system re-licenced, etc.
Yeap, that you would. And For those of you who are comfortable with doing that, great. Have a good time. I’ll go right on using a system that actually works, even when you change every aspect of the underlying hardware. I could have made a ghost copy of the partitions on the hard drive, and install that on a different interface typed hard drive.
That’s the beauty of Linux. In my case Ubuntu, but I understand this works with a few other distributions as well.
My laptop died the same day from a similar event. I havne’t bothered to get a new machine for it yet, although I may pull the hard drive and mount it to one of my desktops. But I didn’t keep much directly on that machine, storing most of my data on my 4GB thumb drive. Which happens to have a couple of corrupt files and complains endless whenever I try to use it now. But not because of the water that got spilled on it a couple of weeks ago.
Comment by Dave DuJour — July 15, 2008 @ 1:08 am