My laptop has been dying for the past nine months or so. Our apartment in Geneva was pretty dusty (you should've seen the mounds of dust that came out when we opened the desktop), and my poor laptop choked. The fan sounds like it's stuck on something. Like, try imagining how it would sound if a semi-large insect flew into a small fan. Yeah, like that. So since then, I have tried various remedies, mostly temporary in nature, from aerosol dusters to ice packs, to holding my laptop at just the right angle, to using a laptop cooling pad. These have offered a temporary respite from the cringe-inducing fan choking noise, but it always comes back. You may be tempted to say, ah, the solution here is simple: just open up your laptop and clean it out. Well, I tried, several months ago. My laptop, which is a Toshiba dynabook C9/214LDEW, opens from the keyboard. There are a few screws in the bottom that I took out, I snapped out the plastic cover just above the keyboard, took out the screws holding the keyboard in place, lifted out the keyboard. To the left were some slots for extra RAM, and screws all around the base of the keyboard. I took them all out, being careful to note where they came from, and then ... nothing. I could not get any further. I could not reach the fan, despite it being only half a centimetre away. So I put it all carefully back, and have been living with temporary solutions ever since. Opening it up and cleaning and/or replacing the fan is likely the only permanent solution. The worst is that each temporary solution eventually stops working, and I'm forced to look for something new. But each time I find something that works, I am lulled into a false sense of security, thinking maybe this time it will keep working. And so I put off backing up the important stuff on my laptop, so I can open it up for surgery again, putting it off and putting it off, oh it'll be okay for another little while, until ... the fan has another asthma attack. And I immediately feel guilty for not having backed up my stuff because after all I KNEW this was coming, and then I have to look for a new solution. Rinse and repeat. So what does this tell us about human nature, or my nature at least? (Well, I tend to procrastinate a lot, but we already knew that.) I don't feel like coming up with a pithy moral for the rest of you, but I can't help but feel the force of procrastination, to the point of destruction. How is it that I know that I should do something, and that doing it will bring positive consequences, and I know in addition that NOT doing it will bring very negative consequences, and yet I still don't do it? And when I get a temporary reprieve, why do I STILL not do it? It's pathological and self-destructive.
Anyway, today I finally copied over my photos, my work, my music, and various other odds and ends onto Seb's shiny (relatively) new 500 gig hard drive. With the fan squeaking and sounding like it was going to die the whole time, I gritted my teeth and was determined - DETERMINED - to open my laptop up and fix it damnit. After hitting it on the rear though, it went back into remission. So once more, I feel the tug of "oh, it'll be okay for a while now, I'll just go surf the web for a little bit..." At least this time my stuff is backed up.
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