My laptop is very old, and I know one day it is going to need some serious replacing and I am not entirely ready and willing to do that change yet. I still run Windows 7 and my laptop is nearly 10 years old. I’ve been across the planet with this thing, I’ve met people, bonded with Dragons, watched, created, wrote, typed, worked, played, studied, cried at, relaxed with, yelled at, been alarmed. This device has served me a long time. It had never been cleaned out, and I know fan blades can collect hair and dust over time, and my laptop had moments where it would overheat and need venting, so after once such event on Feb 6, I thought I would use Youtube Tutorials and try and fix it myself. I unscrewed and fiddled and dug through its guts, learning some mild things. However, my laptop’s fan compartment is located under the motherboard which I was terrified of hurting, so I put it all back together and wouldn’t bother about it, unfortunately when I was pulling it apart I must have disconnected a wire that goes from the power button to whatever that leads to, and my laptop wouldn’t turn on.

So I took it to a guy, who fixed the problem and also cleaned out all the dust and hair and cat fur (9 years worth, gross!) The service cost me $75, then when I got it home, it turned on but everything I noticed was really slowed down and sluggish and lagging. Everything took forever to load. My computer was technically in worse condition than when I brought it in. I was salty about it for a long while, desperately trying to get things done on it. Nomaxice helped me with some stuff, and highly encouraged me to backup everything which I was dreading, but I managed to get it all done within a day, so I was really happy he pushed me to do it. I owe him big time, like Khaiju BIG.

All that aside, my laptop was still sluggish and slow and I was having a hard time accepting that I will have to fork out the money to get a whole new one, especially since all the newer models are smaller, thinner and don’t have disc drives or usb ports. The problem was I didn’t want to have to take my laptop in and pay for someone to tell me it was easier to buy a whole new one.

I waited a few more days and finally took it in to a different computer guy and he examined everything and basically said for my older model it would cost about the same to buy the parts and pay for the service as it would be to buy a whole new laptop. None the less he fiddled around and discovered that one of my RAM’s was shot, likely by static electricity to which they are very vulnerable to. My laptop was only running on 2GB of RAM with the larger 4GB one dead. So a couple new RAM things later and my laptop is back up and running at what it used to be, with the addition of the dust/hair cleanout.

My HDD is still old and will one day have its death-click and die on me, and when that day comes, perhaps I’ll invest in an SSD, hmm. At least now I can keep to a healthy habit of backing up my Data.