New hard disk
My laptop's hard disk died last week. It's been going on and off for a while, making these little clicking sounds and stalling on reading. That's always a bad sound, but I was always too busy to deal with it. But you can never leave these things for too long. I suppose those times I dropped the thing weren't very good for it.
One day, I was using the machine when it refused to work any longer. I suppose this was a fairly long-lived chunk of hardware, as it was built in May 2000. Six whole years. I tried pulling out my spare laptop disk and using that, but this was doomed to failure. Back when I got to second disk, they were still making 12mm-height drives. Which don't fit very well in a 9mm slot.
So today, I went to the computer store and got myself a brand new disk. They make really large hard drives these days! I put it in, installed a new version of Ubuntu, and I was off to the races. Hurray!
Now I have to get all my configuration files back on. Oh dear.
Update at 2006-09-27 18:29: The new disk died today. It didn't even last twenty-four hours. I brought it back to the shop where they reluctantly exchanged it for a new one. I hope that things turn out better.
Update at 2006-09-28 1:34: The newest disk seems to not like the laptop. I think it's overheating. Damn.
Update at 2006-09-28 2:10: Nnggh. Nope. It looks like I have a bad bit of ram at 73.3MB. Time to see if I can get the badram patch working tomorrow.
Update at 2006-09-30 12:02 Oh, I give up. This machine is not going to work again, for any reasonable approximation of working.