My Poor Computer...

[erico]

Don´t worry about a bucket kicked...keep an eye on your personal important files, that is what matters.
If possible, hold 2 backups and on different drives.

[Marcus]

Indeed, better safe then sorry My SO's dad lost everything once. I set him up with a small RAID 1 box (2x500gb) and he is now happy...

Luckily computers do not cost as much anymore. My laptop for 290€ is amazing, and you can even get smaller ones for 200, even 160€.

Then there's always the refurbished route. I got a friend's father a 140€ dual core computer three years ago, still happy.

For a school a few years back I got some 30€ computers as web-browser and word processing stations with a shared printer.

If I think back what my first computer (not counting the cpc) did cost... and it only had 8mb of ram and a few hundreds of megabytes of disk space, and that was pretty nifty back then!:-)

[superfreaky]

The laptop I'm typing this on (a lenovo 3000 n100) is sooooo worn out! The trackpad only works when the laptop is in a certain position on my lap, the screen is all too dim, and the battery is so bad, if you unplug it for a minute, it dies and only turns back on after 45 minutes charge time. The shell is missing part of the plastic on one side, exposing the heat sink, and speaking of heat, did I mention that the laptop gets really hot and the fan is going all the time? Yeah, it still is used frequently. Just a testament to how much things cost.

[erico]

About the heat, open it up and clean the dust, should be fine then.

[superfreaky]

I might do that if I wasn't so lazy! At one point, I did open up the hatch next to the fan. It was almost completely clogged with dust! I think the main reason for the excess heat is that the pc is running XP, which got really slow towards the end (ask me how often my dad replaces his pc[I learned how to use windows on an xp machine, and I just turned 16!]) the 1.6 ghz processor is constantly in like 100% usage.