My personal computer is old and kind of terrible, but it’s old for a reason: I never quite feel ready to pull the trigger on a new MacBook. I almost did six months ago, but I backed off because everything is kind of up in the air right now. Lately, I’ve been thinking six months from now. Surely by then I’ll know what grad school I’ll be in, if any, by then.
A great plan until yesterday when I decided I’d try to start coding again with all this spare time I’ve had lately. The hard drive on that evil machine has been threatening to fail on me for about a year, maybe a little bit longer. You know the drill: super loud scratching mixed with nerve wracking load times. You eventually learn which files are in “the bad parts” or something like that. I’m no hardware genius, but I know what worked for me: mainly saving everything online and hoping the thing didn’t give up on life while I was writing a paper at 3 AM.
Yesterday require installing new software though, which failed about thirteen hundred times, but of course, I kept plowing ahead with it. Eventually, I gave up for the day figuring today would be the day I fixed everything. Nope. After listening to that hard drive grind on itself in varying volumes of nails on the chalkboard, it gave up. It won’t boot. It says something about “bad storage device: check CD-ROM or hard drive.” It’s the hard drive. Oh well.
I guess I don’t have much of a choice at this point though, and maybe it’ll be a nice little motivator to get things done more quickly. Or something. RIP computer that’s been nothing but trouble from day one (4 and a half years ago).
