He's Dead, Jim

It's official. My laptop is no longer among the functioning. The 80Gb hard drive only reports 63Gb and most of that can't be read.

It's a Lenovo, so I don't have recovery disks. The recovery software is on a partition on the hard drive, and it seems to be corrupted as well. When I try to run the system recovery, it starts and then crashes.

I'm sorry to see this system go. It's been a stalwart companion for 5 years (it's a T61) and has served me and mine well.

Yes, I could replace the hard drive and purchase a new OS to put on it, but it's likely that I probably wouldn't get more than another year's use out of it anyway. It's been having thermal issues with the GPU and CPU recently, which are probably contributing factors to the hard drive's ultimate demise. Luckily, I had everything backed up, so I've lost no data, just an old friend.

Since my wife's computer has been acting up of late as well, I think we'll just replace both old workhorses at the same time.

As before, I wanted a system with the little joystick on the keyboard, but I'm lowering my standards as far as that goes.

I went shopping again, and after looking at what would be best for our needs (light word processing, internet surfing, some light programming, and some possibly heavy gaming), I found these from Asus. [How do you pronounce "Asus" anyway? I've always pronounced it "Ay-suzhz", but my co-workers here pronounce it "aa-Zues".]

The reviews seem really good, and while I've never had an Asus laptop, I've had plenty of their motherboards (they were my preferred brand when I still built desktops) and a few of their graphics cards. I've always been pleased with their quality and customer service.

If the wife agrees (and doesn't pass out from sticker shock), we'll be ordering two of these in the near future.