Well, another thursday, another hacking society. Decided that I had
been to the Southern Sun too much of late, so I went up to
Boulder early and hit the Tandori Grill for dinner. Very
nice. The Chicken Tkia Masala (spicy) was pretty spicy and
yummy. Garlic Nann was also good. They got mobbed just as I was
finishing up, but got pretty good service until then. I left
there and went up to the Southern Sun to see if anyone was there
and ran into rise. He said no one else was there, and the wait
for a table was more than an hour, so we just went over to Caffe
Sole instead. This brings me to the laptop woes.
My laptop has been flaky of late. I had it marked down to the swsusp
patches I had been playing with, but when I woke up this morning
my laptop was locked up. Looks like it locked at about 3am
(which is when my backups fire off). It was blinking the num
lock light which indicates a panic, but of course the screen was
blanked. When I powered it down and back on it wouldn’t even
come up, just turned off. Finally it came up. Tonight when I got
to Caffe Sole it came up ok, but then it decided to spew a disk
error and mark the drive read only. 🙁 I shut it down and ran a
fsck.jfs on it, and it came up ok after that. Sure looks like
the drive is hosing up, which is strange since I just got this
new drive in december. They sure don’t make them like they used
to. I did take it out of the laptop and re-seat it and it sounds
a lot quieter, perhaps it was just a connector. The other
possible weird thing that could be causing problems is my USB
wireless. I have switched that off for now and am using a pcmcia
one, so that should tell me if thats the culprit.
Of course since my laptop is my main machine (I am on it probibly 18
hours a day) I looked around to see if I could see a good
replacement one. The HP zt3000 looks pretty sweet. You can get a
1980×1200 screen in a 15.3″ form factor. Seems to run linux
pretty well and it’s about 6.5 lbs. The downside is that it’s
only got at best a 1.7ghz p4 in it, which would in fact be
slower than my current 1.8ghz. They even have a credit card buy
deal that would let you pay 0% interest if you pay it all off in
12 months. Tempting, but I really like my current laptop if I
could get it stable.