Death of a Laptop: 4 Warning Signs I Chose to Ignore

Yes. It's true. After 4 great years, my aptly named "Behemoth" has kicked the technological bucket. For my well-read readers, the title of my blog was indeed inspired by the play "Death of a Salesman", by Arthur Miller - a tragic story about an unsuccessful salesman who ends up killing himself in a car crash so his family can cash in a life insurance policy.

What does that have to do with my laptop? Not much, I guess. I'm not saying my slowly aging laptop intentionally failed to boot up so that I could run out and buy a shiny new one. Although, that's pretty much exactly what I did. *queue shifty eyes* <_<  >_>

"Don`t cry for me...I'm already dead."

Despite being 4 years old, that machine was still a well performing piece of technology. I'm not saying there weren't warning signs. Quite the contrary, as I will outline below:

(1) Finicky LED Lights and Buttons


One of the first things that started happening over a year ago was the gradual failure of the little lit up buttons at the top of the laptop that let me raise, lower, and mute the volume, open up programs I never used, and more! Sometimes the volume button lights would be out, but still work when I pressed them. Sometimes they would be out and completely unresponsive. It didn't seem to be a big deal - just normal wear and tear, right? Possibly, but there's no way for me to know for sure.

There's nothing interesting about failed LED lights, so instead I present you with this tasty little nugget - another failure in lights - a clever failure, however.

(2) Possessed DVD Drive


Sometimes I thought I'd better call up an old priest and a young priest and start screaming, "the power of Microsoft compels you!", because my DVD drive would sometimes pop open on its own, without anyone pushing the button. I admit, the reason was that the mechanism had become extremely sensitive, and would react when the desk was bumped or the laptop was moved, but sometimes it was just creepy. I recall one instance when Farah (my lovely wife, for those of you who don't know) simply reclined the couch and the DVD drive's gears made a sound and popped open from a whole 15 feet away. It was quite odd.

Fortunately, it never had to come to this.

(3) Random Blue Screens of Death


Oh, the coveted blue screen of death. The dark face of Windows. While not alarming, I did see this happen more than I would have liked, and looking back, it seems it was linked to the main reason why my laptop died - the component that linked the motherboard to the display was slowly failing day by day.

No matter how bad it gets, I will continue to be a slave to Microsoft.

(4) A Previous Failure


All of these warning signs actually led up to the ultimate demise of my laptop a year ago, but the machine was still under extended warranty, so I was able to get it repaired for free. Naively, upon receiving my laptop back from repair, I thought everything was hunky dory Little did I know that the repair would only buy me another few months of time. Hunky dory? Really? Well, too bad. I'm leaving it in.

The laptop functioned fine for a while, until only recently when all of the above warning signs started to reoccur leading up to a few days before this post, when I realized my laptop had finally decided to quit on me. I could have gotten it repaired again, but the cost to fix it outweighed the cost of buying a new one, which by the way is happily purring away to my numerous key strokes at this very moment.

So, while I patiently wait for necessary programs to download so I can pick up my professional life once again, I implore you to be aware of the warning signs that your computer may be presenting to you, and take appropriate action. And remember: a backed up file is a happy file.

I apologize for posting this image. Wait...you laughed, didn't you? Didn't you?!