Technology Woes

I think my laptop is dead. It reached three years old and is finally in the throes of agonising component-by-component shutdown.

On Saturday, it stopped working. The power cut out while I was in the middle of something. Originally (based on the smell), I suspected that the power input had just been fried. After bitching loudly to my better half, I investigated the Antec laptop cooler, which seemed to have blown one of the two fans.

So we went to buy a new cooler, the Vantec, which seemed to work, but lately the laptop slows down and runs at 100% CPU whenever I do anything … and it stopped twice on Sunday. Yes I know it's running Vista, but it also, every so often, flashes the Caps Lock and Num Lock keys at me simultaneously.

Ergo, I think it's dead. And Vista killed it.

So now I'm of the opinion that before my three-year old P4 2.6GHz laptop dies completely (it is three years old, but with a new 80GB Seagate drive in it), I'm going to move everything to my iMac. Out of necessity, I need to run some form of Windows on the Mac. It's a PowerPC G5, thus Parallels and BootCamp is out of the question, so I am investigating both Virtual PC and VMWare.

Once I've got that going and my files transferred, I am going to think seriously about getting rid of the excess equipment. I will consider (if it still has life in it) running Linux on my notebook again, but without the overhead of Windows in a virtual machine. It's just not capable of that.

So I'm now sitting with an iMac, an AMD Athlon (firewall), a P4 2.8GHz tower (file and print server), an iMac and my notebook. Consolidation is probably a good idea.

It might be a good idea to invest in a NAS device to hold all my hard drives, get rid of the tower and the firewall, and replace with a small Planet WAN router / firewall.