Well, there goes my plans of buying an iPod next month.
My laptop, which is my only system, has recently only been getting about 2.5 hours of usage before going critical and shutting down. That is of course after I have tweaked the settings to the lowest. HDD is set to lowest possible acoustics without spindown for minimum power consumption. Pentium M has been undervolted to lowest stable voltage with a +10% buffer for safety. ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 Pro Turbo has PowerPlay turned on to downclock my videocard to 50% stock speeds when running on battery. All this and still only getting 2.5 hours. Luckily, I can find a new battery on eBay, i just have to figure out which ones are selling bunk generic batteries and genuine Dell parts. I guess that's better than paying Dell almost double the highest price I can find on eBay.
To top things off, my previous desire to upgrade to a 100GB 7200RPM HDD has been granted in an oh-so-bittersweet manner. My system has started hanging while my HDD clicks and seeks like a DVD/CD drive when reading bad sectors. This has become quite frequent in the past 72 hours. Last night, while doing a bit of an emergency "I-better-do-this-before-it-dies" backup, it began throwing up "cyclic redundancy errors" while skipping. I managed to get all of my important documents and settings backed up as well as all of my media files. Previous to posting this thread, I ordered a shiny new Hitachi Travelstar 100GB 7200RPM HDD which will be at my house in approx 3 days. Ironically, I wont be at my house for approximately another five days. Lets hope this bugger makes it that long.
So, my plan to purchase an iPod to compliment my music collection has been derailed by lifes little annoyances. Perhaps it was a divine redirection of priorities. Or maybe its just the simple fact that electronics are and always will be designed to malfunction when its most inconvenient.
To make things even more annoying, I just hate having to invest another $300 in this machine when I was planning on upgrading next January to a MacBook Pro. I suppose now I'll be more inclined to make this one last as long as possible.
Another 2 years I suppose.
Ugh, electronics.
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Topic: OT - Best Laid Plans... (Read 1471 times)