Hindsight

Earlier last week, I noticed that my laptop hard drive wasn’t accessing data as usual. Booting into XP took longer, running programs and accessing data took suspiciously long. Knowing how my hard drive “sounds”, I knew that something was up.

I took the cautious step of copying over all essential files and folders on the laptop over to an external hard drive two evenings ago. Yesterday, while transferring some last not-so-essential files, I got the classic BSOD. Over several reboots I witnessed the laptop crash upon loading into Windows, crashing before the interface even popped up and finally not even loading up at all (”Disk failure error”).

The laptop is a Toshiba Satellite 5105-S701 power laptop. It was purchased in 2002. The laptop had a rough start to begin with: it was purchased off Amazon.com and shipped from California to Japan (I was several months into the JET Programme). When it arrived, the hard drive had problems the first day I ran the laptop; a real downer when first receiving a brand new system. I’m pretty sure the laptop was thrown around hard during shipment overseas.

In just a few days, the laptop was shipped from Kitakyushu to Akihabara in Tokyo, where a Toshiba repair center quickly replaced the hard drive and got the system back to me. Since that time, I’ve put the laptop through quite a few paces: I brought it with me to the schools I taught at, kept it on for days on end as an FTP server. I made the Statement of Agreement website on it, followed by the video and wrote quite a few reviews for Gamecritics too. I’ve done a lot with it.

The laptop has recently acted as a side machine/internet laptop. The DVD-RW drive is spotty and the right speaker doesn’t work. Other than that, the machine has pretty much been my side for quite awhile.

It’s easy to wonder why I would be so attached to a computer. Specifically, a hard drive. But if you look carefully at the what and when of it all, the laptop has been around during some of the most interesting times of my life. It helped me create some very cool works.

After taking the hard drive out from the bottom of the laptop, I searched for the hard drive on eBay via the model number printed on surface. The cost ranges from $65 for the same drive to around $45 for smaller, 30gb model. I should be diving in for a replacement, but I’m waiting for payday to come around.

30gb hard drive, you served me well.