The Old New Thing

More tales of dead computers: My home desktop

Yes, I said that my next dead computer story would be the AlphaServer, but late-breaking news has forced me to shuffle the order a bit. My home computer has been circling the drain for several months. (The Northbridge fan would buzz and sometimes spin really slowly.) When the motherboard finally stopped powering on, I knew its time was up. ...

Another dead computer: My personal laptop

I'm kind of surprised at how much people reacted to my previous dead computer story. I guess there's an audience for stories about dead computers. Today's dead computer is my Sony Vaio PCG-Z505LE laptop, with a 600MHz processor and 192MB of RAM. Certainly a big step up from that 486/50 with 12MB of RAM. Laptop computers have a comparatively...