This evening, as I was working away on the laptop that has been my main system for the last couple years, things got suddenly much quieter in the office — my desktop system, which had been running near-continuously for most of its five and a half years of life, had shut itself off very abruptly. It wouldn’t respond to the power button, and a second later I detected a faint electrical burning smell. I strongly suspected that it wasn’t just resting.
A few minutes of troubleshooting narrowed the problem down to either the power supply or the motherboard — both easy enough to replace, and relatively cheap these days. But I’m debating whether it’s worth resurrecting. In the past few years, I’ve used it less and less… its duties were down to acting as an interface for our Skype phones, holding archives of seldom-used files, and occasionally being pressed into service for a networked game of Age of Empires III when a guest comes over (which it was barely powerful enough for anymore). And it is a desktop, from near the you-can-fry-an-egg-on-it generation — it’s far more wasteful of electricity than most laptops.
So I think it’s “so long and thanks for all the files,” at least for now. Maybe I’ll replace it eventually, but for now I just don’t see any need for a desktop system.
My desktop system is really a laptop system without a battery, 24 watts. Apple, if it’s such a green company now, should be selling the mini as a “green computer”. Of course, I think Steve Jobs wishes he could kill the mini and is waiting ’till he can, it still uses a nearly two-year-old generation of chipset and intel soon will stop making it; without any redesign, I suspect it’ll get terminated like some other cool Apple desktop computers like the Cube….
If the rumors are accurate though about Macbooks using an nvidia chipset in the next generation, maybe I’ll upgrade somewhere along the road to a Macbook – I could use more 3D oomph, right now the X1300 (?) intel graphics is not a great deal better than my GMA950 graphics so it really wouldn’t be justified for me to upgrade as far as functionality goes.
Well, I finally couldn’t hold out and this November I should be getting a laptop of sorts, a Dell Mini 9 Inspiron netbook. 🙂 I think I should be able to use Thunderbird with encryption, which will allow me to do email on it – I could even use imap with it and avoid having some messages stored on one computer, and some on another…
Congratulations!
The only problem with IMAP is that it pretty much requires network access — you can’t read and compose messages offline with it, or at least you couldn’t the last time I looked at it, several years ago. Some programs might have implemented that by now.
I hope that’s not the case, because I’ll need to do that.