I think my desktop has finally given up the ghost - or, more accurately I suppose, I've finally given up on it. I attempted to start it the other day, and it got to the "loading Windows" screen, where it sat .. and sat .. and sat, while making pitiful chirping sounds. I'm tired of it pulling stunts like this all the damn time; I don't use it often enough to be worth the futzing it inevitably takes to bring it back to life. I suppose it's about time - I've had it since ... 2002 or early 2003, something like that, and it's been through .. 5? 6? moves since then. I'll keep the monitor and speakers and probably pull the hard drive, but I don't think any of the rest of it is even worth salvaging. Unless someone wants a DVD-ROM drive or a wireless or wired ethernet card or a 3.5-in floppy drive or PS/2 mouse & keyboard. And maybe my mom could use the RAM, once I see what size it is. (I suspect the motherboard has issues and I don't particularly trust the power supply, either, so I don't really feel good about donating it to charity.) Then I just have to figure out where best to dispose of the remains ..
I spent a good chunk of yesterday pulling out and reformatting my old laptop. I restored it to the original Toshiba settings, removed all the excess crap, ran Windows Update a zillion times, installed Firefox, Avast, Office 2003, MalwareBytes, Spybot, and Vuze ... and it is still every bit as finicky and slow and apt to drop connectivity and/or suddenly freeze as it was before I reformatted. Which at least means the issue was not the accumulated software kluge of 4 years' heavy use, but instead something hardware related (or just that the processor is too slow for anything) and I feel rather less guilty now about buying a new laptop when the old one still kinda worked, but ... ugh, I was really hoping for improvement. It does start up faster now, at least.
And my *new*(ish) laptop BSOD'd on me while I was backing stuff up to DVD yesterday. SIGH. (But it came back okay! And it's still very very speedy compared to any other computer I have owned ever!)
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I spent a good chunk of yesterday pulling out and reformatting my old laptop. I restored it to the original Toshiba settings, removed all the excess crap, ran Windows Update a zillion times, installed Firefox, Avast, Office 2003, MalwareBytes, Spybot, and Vuze ... and it is still every bit as finicky and slow and apt to drop connectivity and/or suddenly freeze as it was before I reformatted. Which at least means the issue was not the accumulated software kluge of 4 years' heavy use, but instead something hardware related (or just that the processor is too slow for anything) and I feel rather less guilty now about buying a new laptop when the old one still kinda worked, but ... ugh, I was really hoping for improvement. It does start up faster now, at least.
And my *new*(ish) laptop BSOD'd on me while I was backing stuff up to DVD yesterday. SIGH. (But it came back okay! And it's still very very speedy compared to any other computer I have owned ever!)