They don’t make hardware like they used to
About 10 months ago, my brother gave me his old laptop (about 6 times as powerful as my newest laptop), and I immediately started using it as my main laptop. For a while, I was running Bigotsoft Windows 2000, but when Bigotsoft went evil, I, after much grumbling over the terrible installers that are available, installed Slackware Linux, set up kde and mozilla moonviper, got the pcmcia subsystem working so I could plug in wireless ethernet cards and talk to the outside world.
This worked surprisingly well. I hadn't get gotten around to setting up the encrypted pptp tunnelling I need to use to telnet in to work (I was doing it on a Windows machine, but work, since it's mainly a Windows house, is crawling with viruses, and whenever a new Windows machine shows up, even one that's got a/v software running on it, approximately 300 zombies start pounding away at it as if they were the electronic version of Ichneumon wasps trying to lay their little eggs into the vitals of my PC. I don't like reinstalling windows, so I don't tend to telnet into work very often anymore) and was just using the laptop to run moonflea, so twiddly things like cut and paste not working (really! putty's cut and paste isn't compatable with seaflea's cut and paste, which isn't compatable with konqueror's cut and paste. I'm doing a lot of hand-typing of URLs these days) are not the problem they are on my Linux workstation at work.
But yesterday, the bottom fell out of the Toshiba. Since it's running Linux now (and thus being able to get back to a windowing environment is not such a sure thing as it with Windows), I just left the laptop running all the time. When I'm not using it, it's mainly idle; it produces a little heat, but not even enough to get the fan running, so you would think that when we laid it on a bed it would be okay, right?
Wrong.
When we finished shooing the pedestrians of the apocolypse off to bed, I settled down to look at stuff on the computer. The laptop was pretty warm, but not so hot it was uncomfortable to put on my lap, but the screen had gone white (it does that occasionally when it gets warm; the computer freezes and the LCD display slowly turns white as the charge drains out of the LCD pixels. Closing and reopening the lid of the laptop usually fixes that problem, and in the cases where it doesn't a simple reboot solves all ills.) I couldn't get the screen back, so I rebooted, and that's when it became apparent that my Toshiba had gone Republican.
First of all, the pcmcia .rc file was gone, replaced with random junk (reiserfs claims to be a logging filesystem, but, like FreeBSD, it only preserves metadata, so you can end up with a system that claims that it rebooted cleanly, but which has files that have perfectly correct metadata carefully wrapped around random disk blocks that have no relationship to the (now lost) original contents of the file. Some FreeBSD evangelists claim that this is an advantage for FreeBSD, because it's apparently worse to have fsck complain about broken files than it is to have the system silently garbage the files, but I remain unconvinced), so I had to reinstall the offending package from the Slackware release cd. And then I went through about 10 cycles of "boot the system, watch it lock up somewhere around rc.pcmcia, reboot the system, watch it lock up somewhere around rc.pcmcia, etc etc etc", followed by hand-executing each line in the rc.pcmcia file, only to watch the system completely lock up (repeatedly) when I tried to run the cardbus daemon.
This daemon used to work, because I was using a D-Link wireless card on the system before the day of the bed, and I was talking to the outside world with no fuss, muss, or bother. The only thing that changed was that the stupid computer was lying on the bed for about 12 hours, slowly picking up Evil Heat Rays and having its tiny little pealike brain slowly distort to the point where it just wouldn't listen to reason anymore.
Sigh. Oh, well, 10 months isn't bad for a modern computer. Of course now I don't have a laptop, and I've already burned through the funds I've allocated to replace dead hardware, so I'll have to cobble one up with the spare parts I've got lying around. Perhaps it's time to commit the ultimate indignity to one of the Powerbook carcasses I've got lying around, and replace the 68000 it's got with a ia32-compatible processor running Linux.