So, here’s the deal: My custom Sager laptop is just shy of 4 years old. She has been a powerhouse for those 4 years and I have used her heavily. She has been my primary machine since she’s more powerful than my work PC and my home PC. Over the past year, she’s been showing signs of wear. She won’t hold a charge for more than a minute or so, some drivers have been acting up, and most recently, the hard drive has been making noise and failing to boot.
I transplanted another drive I had last weekend and had to reinstall the OS since, for some reason, the disk image I had made wouldn’t work on the new drive. I think the original drivers don’t like XP SP2. They worked perfectly with the original XP (pre-SP1) install, but SP2 just made things slightly more unstable.
It’s about time to retire the old girl, but she’s still a good machine. P4 3.2 GHz, 1GB RAM, 15-inch LCD, ATI Radeon Mobility 9600. I’d put her out to pasture as my home desktop PC and replace her with another notebook (MacBook Pro) and she’d work fine, but with a kiddo on the way, I’m trying to save all I can for unexpected expenses that are sure to pop up. I guess I could get a Dell, but I’d still be stuck with Windows as my primary OS. With the Mac OS, I could still run Windows, but I wouldn’t be down completely if I had to reinstall (as I normally do every 8 months or so).
In related news, Microsoft is considering a pay-as-you-go, modular OS. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t pay a monthly fee for an OS unless they would fix any software problems without losing my data. If a modular OS was designed correctly, it could be worth it, though. Make the base stable and secure enough to last 10 years. Add-on modules should be just as stable and secure, but should be able to be replaced easily. This is what’s good about Portable Apps. They are stable, secure, and (mostly) disconnected from the OS. I can replace or upgrade them easily. No uninstallers, no hacking the registry, no empty folders, no traces. Shift-Delete and they’re gone for good. DOS good, Registry bad.
I do expect to see games where you have to apply a little brainpower. No straight hack-and-slash from Raph. Maybe an MMOBFS (Massively Multiplayer Online Bird Flight Simulator)?
