laptop troubles

[Kragen Sitaker]

My laptop is currently a small, fragile desktop.  I'm trying --- so
far without much success --- to get a new lid for it; the hinges got
stiff, the metal frame around the display that attaches to the lid
hinges broke, and the plastic around the hinges broke into many
pieces.

HP, the manufacturer, suggested that I could send it in to have it
repaired, which is obviously unacceptable --- it has my private data
on it, and it would leave me without a computer until they got done
with it.  But they won't let me order the replacement parts for it;
both HP Parts Direct and the service line tell me I'd have to send it
to them.

I tend to be kind of hard on laptops, but the KnowNow Inspiron 5000 I
carried for seven months developed only one significant problem ---
the screen hinge screws came loose and had to be tightened.  I've now
had this HP Pavilion N3190 for seven months.  Two keys on the keyboard
have broken (one has fallen off), the CD-ROM occasionally makes scary
noises (although it still seems to work), the floppy drive no longer
accepts disks, the hard disk crashed, the lid hinges have broken the
lid, and its first PCMCIA Ethernet card died after a couple of weeks.
Every moving Pavilion N3190 part has broken in one way or another.

So I might end up buying a new laptop, which isn't really what I
wanted to be spending money on this month.  But it's what I'll need to
do.  Moore's Law being what it is, an equivalent new laptop wouldn't
cost as much as this one did.  craigslist lists several.

I think I might opt for a higher-quality laptop, instead of an
equivalent one, though.  It will probably cost a little more.

I finally switched to a cheaper cell-phone plan yesterday.  Sprint's
rates have gone down considerably since I signed up; my new plan
should save me about $2 a day.

Funny side note: Craigslist has this post from yesterday.  The funny
things you see in Silicon Valley!

Sun E450 - $8000
Reply to: anon-2889003@craigslist.org
Date: Mon Feb 11 22:25:58 2002


Sun E450
4x400 mhz Ultra Sparc II (4 megs cache)
2 gigs of ram - 4x256, 8x128
180 gigs hard drive 10x18.2 (Combination of Fujitsu and Seagate drives)
3 power supplies (each 550 watts)
2 additional Sun Scsi dual channel cards
1 additional 1 port Sun fast ethernet card
Raptor GFX
Comes with wheels!
Solaris 8 installed if you want.
Documentation if I can find it.
Hardly used

Want to pay less- I can take out some cards, ram, etc.
i may have some stuff I can include to meet the price.

(If your application was amenable to clustering and didn't need a meg
of cache per CPU, a four-PC cluster with 512M of RAM and 45G disk per
node would be similar, and it would cost about $2000, new.)