Hmm. New laptop questions.

[ellenmillion]

So, my laptop has been showing signs of wear lately; reluctance in booting, sluggishness with big files, stubborn refusal to wake from sleep... General things you'd expect from a refurbished computer that I bought for $600 after shipping 'just to try' more than 6 years ago.

The past two days have gone from minorly annoying to outright gasping... The boot cycle gets stuck and it needs more and more restarts to function, to the point where I had to restart in safe mode to do a final backup of my files. I'm pretty sure these are the death throes of my trusted laptop.

The timing could be worse, I suppose. I did, at least, get the anthology files off to the printer. And I do have enough saved up to replace it right now.

So, great Internet hivemind! It has been Lo, these many years since I shopped for a laptop. I need something AutoCAD and Creativesuite3 capable. 15 inch screen is a minimum. My working budget is around a grand, with some flexibility. I am not interested in being converted to a Mac. I quite enjoyed having a tablet pc last time around.

What drops of wisdom have you got for me?

Comments

[mathhobbit.livejournal.com]

I like Dell too. You can get exactly what you want, or you can try to find their "seconds" web site where they have good deals on what other people wanted but didn't buy.

http://outlet.us.dell.com/ARBOnlineSales/Online/InventorySearch.aspx?brandId=2201&c=us&cs=22&l=en&s=dfh

But trying to fix the existing computer would be more fun (for me)! Have you tried defragmenting your hard drive? Run msconfig from the DOS prompt (Run... option in my Windows menu) and told junk software to stop wasting your time? Scanned for viruses? A full reinstall would probably help, but is more work than (I think) a six year old computer is worth. If it's a desktop I'd try Kelkyag's suggestion of opening it up and at least blowing out the dust, but if it's a laptop I would not.

[renatus.livejournal.com]

In my experience it's easier (and sometimes no more time consuming) to do a full reinstall than to do a cleanup of a failing install. Maybe doing this sort of thing as a job soured me on any fun aspect of it. :)