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rfc7168
7y

My laptop started making faint high-pitched noises - I hope I misheard and it's actually just some coil singing inside the power-supply and not one of the disks/something else - also, I seem to have dropped 4GB of RAM suddenly where there should be 8GB.

(Also, I should really wipe the messed up dual-boot still residing on disk from last semester and replace it by a fresh arch-only install. (No time and joy in debugging that right now.) Probably something for tomorrow evening.)

The device is ~8 years old by now and starting to fall apart - nothing duct tape can't fix - but I'm somewhat worried about the rest right now. D:

Meh, I really need that laptop during the next two weeks, I just hope the hardware doesn't die on me in the meantime because I can't wait for an order to arrive, let alone afford some cheap replacement.

Comments
  • 3
    @Condor that's certainly true. My laptop lasted less than a year without fault.
  • 5
    I've got a laptop from about 7 years ago. It gets really hot after 15 minutes. Battery struggles to make 45 minutes, depending on usage. It sounds like a fucking rocket 24/7.

    But it's still running, so I'm still using it. I use it to stream movies to my TV since the TV can't connect to the school WiFi.
  • 3
    @Condor It's sometimes slow as hell, but it usually loads rather quickly. Had to break out the Ethernet cable to get speeds fast enough for decent streaming.
  • 4
    @jhh2450 you better replace that battery if you can, it’s most of the time cheaper and better for the environment
  • 2
    @-vim- It's honestly no big deal. If I can get 3 more months out of it, I'll be ok. I plan on getting a new apartment, so I'll be able to use my smart TV. And then I'll just use my Raspberry Pi for the streaming I cant do on the TV. (Such as free movie sites.)
  • 1
    Probably the power supply if it was at night (they sing all the time but quietly). An 8-year-old laptop might have quite a dusty heatsink, depending on conditions.
  • 1
    @Condor Yeah, it's one of the older thinkpads, clunky as hell compared to newer laptops but still good. (Or so I hope ... D:)
    Only larger thing I had to replace since buying it was the battery.

    @electrineer Jup, might've been that. Heat sinks and fan should be alright since I clean it once or twice a year.
  • 1
    Make sure you’re running an incremental backup at least daily to a (relatively) new external drive and/or the cloud!
  • 0
    @ChristianGeek Nothing important to back-up on there, but would be a good practice if there was.

    (Welcome to devRant? :) )
  • 1
    @nin0x03 Thanks for the welcome!
  • 2
    Go to a store, get an external hard disk (the same size as your laptops hd), clone it using clonezilla. If it dies, you'll have a configured system with all your data, that you can just put on some hardware
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