My poor old laptop. It’s a Dell Inspiron 8500 which I’ve had for three and a half years. It’s been to America, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany and Ireland and is about to go on trips to Hungary, Poland and Spain. It’s been used almost every day. It has been a maid of all work, carrying out business and personal tasks for me and for Hels for the whole of that time. And the poor thing is beginning to show the signs of age.<\/p>\n
This week, I’ve noticed that it’s been slowing down a lot. Partly, I’m sure, that is due to heat, as the fan is running a lot and the battery life is consequently diminished. But I also took the time to have a poke about in the innards and found that the hard drive is 94% full. This is clearly not sustainable. So I’ve shunted some of my less-frequently heard music files on to the external hard drive that I use to back everything up (6pm, every Thursday), used the disk cleanup utility and had a defrag. Things are running a little more smoothly now, but it is clear that this computer is not long for this world, certainly not as my main computer (I plan to retire it and give it to Hels to use).<\/p>\n
However, I’ve decided that it must struggle on for a little while longer. Having looked at the specification required to run Windows Vista, it seems sensible for me to wait until after the launch of Vista and purchase a new machine then, bundled with the new operating system. It certainly makes no sense to buy a machine now and then have to fork out to upgrade the OS next year.<\/p>\n
Of course, what I really need to do is spend some time deleting more crap from the hard drive. There are certainly some photos there that are of no value and could disappear. There are probably some music files too. And I suspect that there are one or two stupid games that I could live without. The problem is that I’m not very well disciplined with my hard drive – I tend to shove everything on it and treat it like a huge dustbin that I can go and rummage in when I need to find something.<\/p>\n
So, what shall I do? Change my ways? Or buy a computer with a bigger dustbin?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My poor old laptop. It’s a Dell Inspiron 8500 which I’ve had for three and a half years. It’s been to America, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany and Ireland and is about to go on trips to Hungary, Poland and Spain. It’s been used almost every day. It has been a maid of all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6026"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6026\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}