Raymond Chen, one of bloggers I frequently read (and one person with whom I would gladly work if I would join Microsoft Corp. someday), used to dedicate a post every time one of his computers die. Well, I have never experienced such a thing… until yesterday.
RoadWarrior, my first laptop computer, died. That fact has been so shocking to me. Seville’s summer is too hot for a laptop (last year, RoadWarriorII’s hard disk drive stopped working). RoadWarrior was almost four years old. I bought it in october 2004 for 999€. It was a Packard Bell Easynote G1320. If you read some reviews of this laptop, most of people will complain about it (bad Wireless card, short battery life, …). Most of them are right, but it always served to my purposes as well.
During its lifetime, I developed a great number of applications with RoadWarrior: hairshop software, part of my job as an asp.net software developer engineer intern in Spanish National Research Council, accounting and stock software, bank check printing software, some sort of web applications for DotNetClubs, etc. RoadWarrior was great help developing this tasks with its great keyboard design and soft touchpad.
In summer 2006, I extended its computer power with one 1GB PC2700 DDR 333Mhz RAM module. It had 1280 MB of RAM. That was huge for a laptop so I disabled Virtual Memory (as I said in previous postings).
In February 2007, I bought a new laptop: RoadWarriorII. I bought it because working with RoadWarrior was difficult (optical drive didn’t work properly, battery drained so fast, colors were not being represented properly on screen, etc.) However, I kept using it for some working as well as some personal projects such as posting, solving big SAT instances, learning how to disassemble a laptop among other things.
During that time, RoadWarrior had more RAM than RoadWarrior II. But a few days back, I installed 4GB of RAM in RoadWarriorII. Maybe RoadWarrior died because it was jealous.
Goodbye RoadWarrior! I’ll miss you.
RoadWarrior’s lid customization details.
P.S:For those who like scavenge for laptop pieces, I had a ram memory, a charger, a hard disk, and so on… contact me if you are interested.
Rest in peace.
By the way, it’s funny that way to say “goodbye” to a computer ;)
Best regards
@des I wasn’t just a simple computer, it was my first laptop and we traveled around Spain and part of Europe giving talks. You might be impressed about how much distance we both walked.
P.S: I still have an old Pentium II desktop computer working (it was my first computer) so I didn’t loose any computer until now.
See you in hell,RoadWarrior
Gods save RoadWarrior.
So say we all.
We will miss him.