Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Aging

Doesn't seem to matter if the body belongs to a golf cart, a laptop, or a human - age takes its toll.

I'm not even going to go into details about the golf cart, there are enough blogs on here about that and it's just something that one has to expect with a 14-year-old golf cart that was never intended to be driven on the road, over topes and through sand, grass, and rocks. Oh, and over curbs...

Our poor golf cart was never designed to haul loads of cement blocks and bags of concrete. Or washing machines.



My laptop is 3.5 years old. It is a high-end model. I recently added memory and a larger hard drive because the hard drive that came with it 3.5 years ago was getting full and I was getting the odd error that made me nervous about its health. And I needed the extra space.

My last blog was about my weekend computer woes. Here's the follow-up:

My laptop worked fine all day Monday, with the hard drive that was supposedly not working (according to the diagnostics). But yesterday morning when I turned it on, I was greeted with the error that the drive was an unmountable, unbootable drive - or something to that effect. No number of reboots or attempts to bypass the problem could convince it otherwise. So I swapped out the new drive for the old drive, and at least was able to work all day. And this morning? I was greeted with the error that there was no hard drive - this was the old drive that worked fine all day yesterday, and the computer hadn't been moved all night. Yet this morning for some reason it didn't work. I took out some screws and reseated the drive, and thankfully it worked, but now I'm afraid to shut the darn thing off. I need this drive and its programs for the next 17 working days (oh yes, I'm counting down...). I'm actually suspicious the problem is not the drive but the hardward of the computer. Who knows? Just please get me to the end of the month and then I hardly care.

I'm getting older too. I'm old enough that the female hormones should be retired - everyone else my age and some even younger (like my sister) have ceased being fertile. My body has been doing this for a lot of years, and it's time to stop, I say. Finally this year I thought I'd reached the end; I went a few months without experiencing any monthly visits by the female hormone fairy. Then a surprise in June, and another one at the end of July. And this morning, signs that I was in for another sneak visit. Looking back I think these visits are triggered by stressful events. So there's the key, just avoid stress and all will be well.

I hope the golf cart and my laptop are listening!

7 comments:

Nancy said...

We never turn our desktops off unless we're leaving on a trip or need to reboot after an update or they start to act strange and we think they need a (short) break. My DH has to really fight with his to get it back on after a shutdown. Me...I just don't like the wait, LOL.

On the other thing, I know exactly what you mean. A year ago I was heading that direction, now I'm like a clock again. Forty-two years so far of this is enough!

Life's a Beach! said...

Sue, my laptop's about 3.5 years too. I think they build them to expire at that mark so you have to buy a new one. I'm babying mine along now by not letting it go into sleep mode -- which means shutting it down all the time.

I had all the female equipment ripped out ten years ago except for one ovary. It's continued to give me trouble until just recently, so I may have finally aged myself out of that problem!

Anonymous said...

I feel your pain, Amiga. i just turned the double nickel '55' & am still experiencing the joys of being 'a whole woman'. Yuk. Not even fair cause almost everybody else is done with that (besides you). The one time I tried to exert some control over it, I had a stroke! So there ya go....
Oh, and BTW, I do hope you paint your new Limey the same as the old Limey. It's just too unique to be permanantly retired. And you know you'll have to retire it some day....

Bennie said...

Well Sue I hope it holds up to the 17 days. If not you may just need to leave early. You know it will take that long to get service on a Dell in Mexico.

Sue said...

Nancy - I turn my laptop off to protect it from power surges and electrical strikes, and to let it cool off. So much for coddling, it let me down anyway. And I agree - 44 years (in my case) is more than enough!!

Beck - To shut down your laptop you should be able to hold down the power button for about 4 or 5 seconds - that is the easiest. "Ripped out" sounds painful!!

Anonymous - not sure who you are, but sounds like you're someone who knows me? Anyway, glad to know I'm not alone in this. It's you, me, and Nancy, apparently. Unless someone else steps up too. This is a "club" I'll be happy to be an expired member of.

Bennie - Well, not taking any bets that it will keep going for another 3 weeks, but I'm doing my best.

Anonymous said...

Hi Sue,
Harddrives usually last 1-3 years depending on usage, and of course new harddrives can be bad out of the box. Living on Isla its also possible that you have accumulated salt corrosion on your mainboard, if so it doesnt matter if you turn the computer off or not, when your mainboard goes, thats it, off it goes. I would highly recommend backing up your data on a regular basis. This can be done easily with an external USB harddrive. XP & Vista both have backup progams. You can also simply copy your files to the drive as well. If you are unable to get one asap, email yourself the documents that are most important. You will want to use a webmail account such as hotmail or yahoo so that the email along with your attached documents are actually stored on the web and not your computer. Hope this info helps you. If you have any questions feel free to contact me at Troy@BogdenITServices.com

Sue said...

Hi Troy - thanks for all the tips and the kind offer. I do have a site provider so you gave me the idea to put my important files there - thanks! I do backup, have a full backup from a month or so ago, and then a partial backup of just the files I really wanted (that had changed since that backup) from the new drive that quit. I was afraid to do a full backup in case the problem was a virus and I infected the external drive. So odd to have two drives with the same problem on boot-up - does make me think it's the IDE on the motherboard (when I ran diagnostics that's actually what it said was the problem but then it booted up and I worked fine for a day). I hope to go to Cancun this week to get an external usb and slave that drive so I can see if I can get it up and running. I seem to be getting wordy here so will email you as I have a question for you. Thanks again!