At long last the sad story of my laptop is coming to a close. This morning I collected a brand new machine from IT Services in Maynooth and returned the one I’ve had on loan since last week. I took the new machine home, hastily set it up, and installed Zoom on it, so I could do this afternoon’s telecon. Since that call finished I’ve been installing other necessary things (such as Slack), generally setting it up and connecting it to various accounts here and there. I still haven’t managed to get it to talk to my printer though.
The demise of my old machine has been a long, drawn out affair. The machine failed when I got back to Barcelona from Rome last month. I managed to resurrect it a couple of days later, but it was working only intermittently and even when it did it was very slow indeed. Last week it failed completely so I took it to IT Services and was without a machine until I borrowed a new one on Friday. The issue with the old one being fairly terminal I ordered a replacement on Monday. Today (Thursday) I got the new laptop – which is nice – and returned the one I had borrowed. The old laptop is still with the technical folks who are trying to retrieve my data from the hard disk the failure of which was behind all the problems, or so I’m told.
Although I handed over my old machine they didn’t need the power supply, which is a standard one of which they had plenty. Since the new laptop came with its own, identical to the old one, so I am now up by one power supply. Something I should have done ages ago was to get a spare power supply so I could leave one in the office to avoid having to carry it to and from home. That’s now been sorted for me.
I got my old laptop in 2018, so it is about 6 years old and therefore out of warranty. I suppose I should have thought about replacing it anyway, but I’ve actually been lucky with laptops. I have two much older that both still work.
I bought one of them – from Dell, like my new one – when I was at Queen Mary. It still runs Windows 95 and I never connect it to the internet, but I find it good for typing things on as the keyboard has a good feel to it though it is rather heavy. The other one – from Toshiba – dates from 2001 and is much lighter than the other. It also still works, running Windows 2000*, though I don’t use it very often, primarily because the wi-fi antenna no longer works.
P.S. When people ask me whether I’ve upgraded from Windows 10 to Windows 11, I always say that I’m way ahead of them – I’m already on Windows 2000!
In the Dark 