The Laptop is Dead!

My old, trusty laptop has been in use by me for over 5 years and is virtually falling apart. Poor Eurisco. That’s what I called her, a HP Pavilion ze1210 I bought in 2002.

When I bought her, the AMD Athlon processor was cutting edge and people recommended it over Intel’s then line of Pentiums and Celerons. She had 256MB of memory when about half that was standard on most desktops too! She wasn’t lightweight, but since I just needed a computer to use at home, I didn’t care too much. She still looks pretty stylish in this picture I found online, but if you saw her as she is now…

  • A big gaping hole where the battery should be. After 2 and half years, the battery gave out and I never got around to buying a new one. So to lighten my load, I removed the battery from the slot.
  • Two keys missing. In my zeal to clean the keys and under the keyboard, I managed to break the F1 and Enter keys.
  • A broken hinge. The hinge on the right mysteriously cracked (I have no clue how!) and a small metal piece that held the screen up fell out. So for a long time I had to keep the screen at one particular angle to make sure it was upright, or else it would fall down flat. Oddly, the cold winter in Gurgaon seemed to have done something to the innards since the screen now stands at any angle.
  • The CD-RW/DVD drive doesn’t work anymore. In fact, it randomly clicks now and then in a vain effort to prove it’s still alive. I have some success playing audio CDs, but nothing else works.
  • The USB ports are worn from use, so using any USB accessories is a touch-and-go thing.
  • And the biggest problem of them all, the port where the power cord plugs into the computer is loose, so that if I moved the laptop or jiggled the power cord, it would lose the connection (and since there is no battery, the laptop would go off.
  • On the software side of things, newer apps were beginning to crawl. Firefox was so badly behaved on this laptop that I had taken to using IE7!

I spent many, many hours on this machine coding in Delphi, random browsing, and learned to play an RTS for the first time. Ended up playing hours and hours of Age of Empires II, Starcraft and Warcraft III

I discovered Firefox when it was still called Phoenix and then Firebird. Thunderbird when people still preferred Outlook Express. I used Kazaa (remember that?) when I was first introduced to P2P. And I made my first forays onto USENET posting, IRC (using mIRC) and introduced myself to Linux via Knoppix using Eurisco.

So long and thanks for all the memories! RIP, Eurisco.

3 comments

  1. Ah! I thought this was going to be an opinion piece on the rise of the tablet PC or the march of the PDA. I’m sorry your laptop died. I have a Powerbook from about the same time that’s still going strong, although having put Ubuntu on it I don’t seem to be allowed to put OSX back.

  2. Hehe. Well I could write a post about that. Although, I don’t believe the laptop is dead. I can see a market for “convertible” Tablet PCs but I can’t see “pure” Tablet PCs or PDAs replacing laptops.

    A lot of people can type faster than they can write!

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