My Computer is Dying. Long Live My Computer?
Ugh. My computer has been getting slower and slower over the past few weeks. I think I figured out why. I am told by the CrystalDiskInfo program that the hard drive has a lot of uncorrectable sectors. She is dying.
I ordered a new laptop last week, it’ll be here in a week. So I decided to not write anything important to my desktop computer, wait for the laptop and make it my primary computer. I’m a bit freaked out at this. Change can be hard. Hell, I still have a land line phone.
Last week my beloved AG Neovo monitor died. I’ve had it for about 10 years. I had it repaired for $150 a couple years ago but it would be silly to spend another $150 on fixing an old 19″ monitor when I can buy a new on for about the same price. Now this week my desktop computer is dying. It’s I don’t like it one bit.
I considered doing the following: get a small (128GB) SSD drive, a large (1TB) physical drive, reinstall XP, go from there. But why do it, really? I’m not a computer professional any more. My phone almost is as powerful as my desktop computer. I tell ya why I’d do it. Because I’m comfortable with it. It works. But the times, they change.
Whether or not you decide to do it, I can vouch for running your os on an ssd. It makes a huge difference for perceived computer speed. The downside is that using your computer for work for about 18 months is enough to wear it out.
I’ve got a spare lcd you are welcome to borrow until your new laptop comes in.
Michael, do you have any first-hand knowledge of wearing out an SSD drive? I still haven’t heard of anyone who has worn one out.
Thanks, I don’t need the screen. I’m now down to just 1 screen, which is plenty, considering I am trying very hard to not strain the drive… not do anything “important” on it, nothing that will tire it out before my new laptop arrives in a week or so.
I was in the room, but it wasn’t my drive. My dad switched to ssd for his mac pro about a year and a half ago. It’s his primary computer for work and he uses it a lot. He got something like a year and a half out of his first ssd before he started getting read errors and hangs. I actually physically destroyed that drive for him after he swapped it out.
The advantage he had was that he has what might be considered a paranoid level of backup, and the ssd was only the system, not any of his work files. That meant that he just had to drop the os on another drive and he was right back at full capacity.
Hmm! Thanks! It’s good to keep it real.
I’ve got a lot of backup as well. Crashplan backed up locally and to a friend’s house and the Crashplan servers.
Update: I got a new hard drive from Central Computers for $75, a Seagate ST9750420AS 750GB 2.5″ SATA 7200RPM. Been reinstalling Windows on it for a day now. So far it’s really fast.
When I first reinstalled Windows, it booted in 30 seconds flat. Now after Service Pack 3 and such, it takes 60 seconds to boot. But Windows still feels crazy fast.
During reinstall, I may have deleted all the data on my external backup drive. I’m bummed, but hey, there wasn’t anything important on that drive, right? It was just for backups, right? RIGHT? Ugh, I don’t know, it was all kinda unsorted.
Update: TestDisk saved my external backup drive :-). TestDisk worked where Partition Magic 7 and Ontrack EasyRecovery Professional failed!
The problem was that I had accidentally wiped the partition data while reinstalling Windows XP. The drive still appeared as “Bad” to Partition Magic, so I copied all my data off the drive, reformatted it, and put the data back. The process took a few days; ugh, to be expected when moving 1.1TB around on an older computer. But the process worked!