RIP, Old Laptop

Rest in pieces, old laptop.

Recently my 8-year-old Dell Inspiron 17R 5737 succumbed to the eight-beep error. I considered the various at-home fixes suggested by strangers on the Internet, but I figured eight years was an auspicious lifespan for a laptop anyways. Over the years we made it through Windows 7, 8, 10, dual-booting Ubuntu 16.04, and making the jump to exclusively running Ubuntu; through a battery replacement, upgrade to an SSD, losing the left-arrow key and mashing the spot where it used to be. It was a good run.

Since I didn't have any real backups (oops), I pulled the SSD to manually move files I consider important over to my new laptop. Here's some of the highlights:

• A recording of my old roommate Alan, saying "potato".

• Multiple toilet-related projects.

• A rap for Maroon 5's Sugar (shoutout young breezy).

• The latent files of several classes that I started and then dropped, while at CMU.

• Hundreds of old phone photos, going back to the days when I had a Nokia Lumia (Windows Phone!).

• A little PHP website to ask people about sex toys.

• An draft of an angry email to my high school counselor (I don't know if I ever sent this, actually. Probably better if I didn't).

• Tons of music (by myself and others) that had fallen into some back corner of my memory.

I picked up a 7th-edition Lenovo X1 Carbon and am running Ubuntu 20.04. Jumping forward several years in laptop technology feels great. Let's see if this one holds up for another eight.