Laying an old laptop to rest

Hello readers. It is with great sadness that I must announce the retirement of my faithful laptop. This wonderful machine has facilitated virtually all of my creative efforts over the last ten years. However, it has really started to slow down over the last few months, and with Microsoft promising to axe all support for Windows 10 beyond October, I have finally been forced to lay this mighty laptop to rest.

512 GB in memoriam

Ten years is a fantastic achievement for any PC, let alone a laptop. And to me, the saddest part of all this is that it hasn’t quite stopped working yet. It can still do nearly everything I ask of it, so long as I give it enough time. But sadly, I do not have enough time to spare.

I have been working with this laptop for so long now that I always know the cause of its struggles. When it slows down to a grinding halt, I know that this is only temporary, and that Windows has probably decided to run a security scan in the background, or download a massive new update without informing me. The laptop itself is never the root of the issue. The operating system just asks it to do too much at once – especially when it first switches on. Over the years, I have come to accept that sometimes program icons won’t appear on the taskbar for a full fifteen minutes after the machine boots up. This hasn’t been a huge problem: I just incorporated the additional slowness into my schedule. I always know that my laptop will get there eventually. It’s just a matter of patience.

Of course, this patience doesn’t come naturally to an outsider. Other people treat my whirring laptop with plain incredulity, amazed that anyone would continue to rely on a device so weak and slow. To them, it is incomprehensible that I would wait 10 minutes for a program to load, and I am often asked why I don’t just chuck it out and buy a new one. The thing is, for the most part, I don’t mind. It’s acceptable to me that my laptop sometimes becomes unresponsive, because it’s ten years old. The fact that it works at all is a miracle. To me, its sub-par performance feels like something to be celebrated rather than derided – and for that reason, I have been reluctant to give up on it. My laptop has done nothing wrong. It has fallen victim to the passage of time, just like we all will.

But at what point do I move on? This would have been an easy decision to make if my laptop had suddenly erupted in a fireball due to some particularly egregious MATLAB code. But all the parts are still intact. At ten years old, it still manages to survive for several hours on battery power, and can easily handle my everyday tasks such as word processing and basic spreadsheets. Buying a new machine felt like giving up, because my laptop is still fighting to stay alive, and I know it will keep fighting. It’s trying its best, and it is up to me to decide that its best is not good enough.

Earlier this week, I finally made the decision. The minutes that I spend waiting for basic processes are starting to add up, squandering multiple hours per week in which I could be working. I was forced to admit that even though my laptop appears to be immortal, I only have a finite amount of time on this Earth, and I cannot waste it by waiting for programs to start responding. At this point, I have probably spent weeks starting at a spinning blue hoop on a faded white screen. I know that my laptop always gets there in the end. But I have finally reached my limit.

My laptop

It might seem odd that I never bothered to bestow my laptop with a name. It has always been, quite simply, my laptop. However, now that I have bought a new machine, I realise that the designation of “my laptop” cannot be readily transferred to the replacement. In my head, this shiny new i7 interloper is just “the new one”. It can’t become “my laptop” while my laptop still exists. Perhaps, once the new one proves itself, it might become “my other laptop”. Or maybe, once I have finally transferred all my files and programs and workflows, I will be able to transfer the name as well.

So, what happens to my laptop now that the new one has arrived? Certain tasks will run much better on the new machine, which has 16 rather than 8 GB of ram, and an Intel i7 processor rather than an i5. I certainly need the new model for art, 3D models and games, but simple things like word processing are still perfectly possible with my original machine, so I don’t want to throw it out. I feel like there must be some use for it… But having two laptops might make my life too complicated.

It feels like a waste, saying goodbye to a machine that is mostly functional. Mechanically, everything still works perfectly: the screen, the keyboard, the ports, and even the trackpad are all in excellent condition, but I doubt that any of them can be salvaged. Why can’t laptops be fixed and upgraded in a similar manner to chunky, self-built PCs? I should be able to switch out old parts for new ones, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to do this. All the components are too interconnected, crammed into a tiny space. And when you start looking to buy new motherboards, you might as well spend the money on getting a whole new machine… It just feels like I’m squandering resources. As if I’m throwing out a tool that could still be useful.

A laptop life well lived

My laptop helped me write seven novels, an undergraduate dissertation, and a PhD thesis. It has dealt with countless Excel documents, as well as complicated MATLAB codes for handling massive datasets and running numerical simulations. It has allowed me to make art for this website, posters for conferences, figures for scientific publications, and a whole load of virtual Lego models. It also let me build an action-adventure RPG in the Unity game engine (as well as other, smaller projects), and write 8-bit chiptunes for said game. That’s not to mention all the online meetings, the Discord servers, and online games. This laptop was my main connection to the outside world during Covid, when we were all stuck inside. It really has done an awful lot – and I can only hope that the new one does half as well.

In summary…

Goodbye to my fantastic laptop. Who knows – I might still use it to write my books for the next few months, while I use the new one for work. It’s going to take me a while to get used to the new keyboard… And to get over my profound sense of loss.

Happy reading, and have a lovely week!