Gateway laptop RIP

3 and a half years ago when I started the current job my boss issued me a geriatric Gateway 17" laptop for my field computer. It was a hand-me-down from him; he had it for years then they promoted him and backfilled his previous job with me so I inherited the laptop computer.

Yesterday I had just finished copying the folders from this weeks field work to the network server and had copied some files that I might want if on the road at the end of November (timesheet and vehicle spreadsheets) when it just stopped. I was going to use it to do some on-line training which Windows 7 was being difficult about (figured maybe it'll work better in Windows XP) when it just froze. So I cold booted it. Eventually a bluescreen came up "unmountable boot device." Uh oh.

The only thing I would've lost was some processing I did in a hotel room to make sure we had it before traveling home. All the raw data is still in the data collectors and receivers so at worst I would've just downloaded them again.

So I get I.T. involved. He takes it back to his lair. Comes back several hours later telling me he tried a new harddrive, tried new memory, nothing worked. Something melted. He took the harddrive out and put it in a USB box and only the recovery partition is visible. The memory is bad too. That computer had a massive coronary. When he came back he was like a Doctor about to deliver bad news, we were unable to save your beloved computer. So after this long sympathetic speech I told him not to worry about it, there was nothing on that computer that wasn't backed up. That is a big relief.

They don't know how old it is but we haven't bought a Gateway computer in at least 5 years.

I'm getting a new laptop, finally, yay!

I get a lot of mileage out of the equipment they issue me.