Today my 3 month old Dell Inspiron laptop arrived back from a Dell Depot. Installed in it is a fourth hard drive, the fourth since the first one failed about mid-August, followed by the failure of the second one 3 days after it was installed, followed by the failure of the 3rd hard drive one hour into the four-hour Vista installation process. I see they have replaced the hard drive and the motherboard this time. I wonder if the laptop will actually work smoothly for the rest of its natural life?
I purchased my iMac nearly 6 years ago and it has run like a dream - never crashed, never had a virus. The most stable computer I have ever owned.
I had the laptop upgraded and configured for my daughter and it was always my intention to give it to her when I was able to afford the MacBook I really wanted.
My short foray into the PC world, however, is enough for me.
This woman is an Apple woman. An Apple woman this woman is.
I'm going for the 24" iMac with a tax credit from some years back & trusting that I will have a job soon. I lost quite a bit of work when the first Dell hard drive failed and that's painful. My old iMac hasn't developed any ticks but I can't, for instance, print a PDF file from it anymore, and many of my bills are electronic now. Most of the keys on the keyboard have to be pressed multiple times when writing; the mouse died some time ago & my daughter and I share an old PC mouse. Replacing the OS on such an old computer and purchasing a new keyboard and mouse is hardly worth the money. I am afraid such an old machine will suddenly crash and I'll lose years of work and my daughter will lose her entire iTunes library. We'll grieve for years. I know I should buy a portable hard drive as backup but being out of work, money is tight. Yet there is enough for the purchase of a new computer, just. Through a simple wire we can transfer everything on the old iMac to the new iMac. Plus we get to keep the darling, dear old machine, it's one of the ones with a white half moon base, a pregnant feminine shape to me, for browsing. I wish I'd kept it under a dust cover all these years, I had no idea it was such a survivor. Who knows, it may run beautifully until it becomes a classy antique.
Sheath of feeling. Words groping to touch air.
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wow! everyone i know has had good luck with dell. so sorry to hear of these woes, and i certainly understand the frustration. i have had a few laptops over the decade, but my favoite was my toshiba. fabulous machine. i still have my first laptop which ran windows 95, but for the life of me cannot recall what kind it is. it sleeps on a shelf in the garage! the one i hated with a passion was a compaq, a company now owned by HP. that is a brand i would never purchase again. i used to fantasize violence...and i was the perpetrator beating it with a hammer or throwing it in my creek. good luck in your laptop endeavors. maybe you can sell the new dell which would help pay for the new Mac.
ReplyDeleteOh, yes. My Toshiba laptop was my favourite too! I bought it in 2000, it was a demo at Business Depot. I'll never forget the guy printing out the price from head office and it was exactly what I had in my bank account! It ran Win98 like a charm. It's packaged in the basement but it still works.
ReplyDeleteMy first computer was in the mid-80s - the first "portable" - an Osbourne! It ran CP/M. Huge, we had to put a monitor on it it's screen was literally 4"x4" or something. We had to learn the codes for word processing too.
I had a Compaq too - another early "portable" that was in the shape of a sewing machine and about as heavy. An early LCD screen that was lit from behind. I remember casts of blues on that screen. The computer had lots of problems though.
The next one was a Toshiba laptop, when my kids were babies. I loved that computer! It had an LCD screen that wasn't backlit, though. I craved being able to write in bed at night on a computer. Can you imagine!
Then my ex arrived home one day with a desktop put together by a local computer store near where he worked. I think it was Win95 (funny, I can't remember the OSs between CP/M & Win95). It had a black & white monitor, though, and how the kids & I wished for colour!
Then came the Toshiba beauty. In early 2003 I purchased my first iMac since I'd hoped to film some of my performance pieces but have never had the courage to do so!
The ruby red Dell is now happily running in my daughter's room - it was made for her, I swear. Not that I believe in such energies with inanimate objects, but the dying hard drives became a comedy of errors in itself and I became convinced the computer simply wasn't meant for me. It'll probably run like a charm for her for the next 4 or 5 years, until software & OSs force us to purchase anew.
I'm delighted to hear your tales of beloved and not-so-beloved computers - and that our Toshiba laptops are stored in your garage and my storage space downstairs!