Ode to a laptop (Alas poor Thinkpad, I knew it well)
I’ve spent the last 24 hours digging out from a computer crash, with more success than usual. But it’s not a fun experience. I’ll describe what happened and what I did, more to remind me than for any other reason.
Over the weekend I noticed that my laptop was acting up. It’s an IBM Thinkpad T40, about 2 years old, but very well travelled—it’s been to China twice, to Europe once, to D.C. and other places multiple times, and has accompanied me back and forth between Illinois and Michigan, as well as bumping on my bike back and forth to school every day. Every few seconds I’d get a message that the ethernet cable was disconnected, then it would go away, and then repeat. Network communication was really slow, and I ascertained that it was a problem with the computer rather than the cable or the router.
So I opened up the case to see if something was loose. I couldn’t see anything wrong (and learned along the way that the networking for this computer is on the motherboard rather than on a separate card), but reseated everything I could and closed the case up. It seemed to fix the problem.
Yesterday morning, I took the computer to campus where it worked fine, then carried it over to another building for a lab meeting and back. After that, it wouldn’t start up—the lights come on, the drive starts spinning, but it never tries to read from it or puts up the splash screen. I’ve reopened the case and looked for anything that might account for this, with no luck.
I’m not quite sure what’s wrong. Luckily, I have an ill-starred Toshiba Satellite laptop that’s currently back from repair and I was able to press that into service. Thanks to IMAP storage, I was able to immediately get back nearly all of my email, but not my calendar.
At home, I’ve been using a BuffaloTech Linkstation and Memeo to do a continuous backup. I had some problems with getting restoration to work (something I need to figure out), but I was able to get back the last backed up versions of critical files (such as my Outlook file). The network problems had interfered with the backups, so these were a few days old. I’ll need to explore Memeo further, but postponed that investigation while I tried to reclaim the data on my Thinkpad hard disk.
I bought an external case and put the drive from my Thinkpad in it, and was pleased to see that it works fine and I’ve lost nothing. So now I’m copying old data over to the Satellite.
Ironically, this had occurred just after I’d decided to change my computing setup. For the last year and a half I’ve been working entirely from my laptop, which has suited the transient nature of that period of my life. But there are still some real compromises in working on a laptop, not the least of which is the possibility of massive disruption if the computer is stolen or broken. I’ve ordered some cheap Dell computers for home and school, and now have ordered one of the small IBM Tablet PCs (the X41) to be my laptop. I think that wouldn’t suffice as my only computer, but will work well as a mobile computer carrying the information that I want to have right at hand. We’ll see…
Laptop computers, like luggage, wear out over time, but I’m sorry to see this one go, as it’s served me very well.