Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

under the knife

My laptop has just gone in for “surgery” to replace its fussy hard drive. I can only hope that’s all that’s wrong with it.

Before I left for Seattle, it was making those unsettling grinding sounds on an increasing basis (although not with such regularity that I could figure out what was triggering it). But after sitting dormant for a week while I was out of town, the computer suddenly started behaving again — no strange noises to be heard. I don’t want to worry about the drive dying on me at some point in the future at a supremely inopportune time. Plus, the new hard drive — about the size of an iPod — is larger and speedier and sure to be an improvement.

I’m so attached to this computer, I feel a bit as though I’ve handed over my “baby” — except instead of passing off a diaper bag, it’s a laptop bag. Even though I know it’s in good hands, I feel a bit nervous parting with it. Good luck, little guy.

Updated: 7 p.m. - Aegis has been wheeled into the recovery room, so to speak, and the prognosis is excellent. Erik did a beautiful job with the transplant, and it’s healed without any scarring. (Translation: The new hard drive has been installed, there’s no sign the case was ever opened and everything is working super-spiffy. Thank you, Erik!)

On the geeky side, XBench has registered some definite improvements in disk speed. (You can compare against similarly-configured 1.25 GHz Powerbooks on the XBench site to see the difference.) As far as noise levels go, the new hard drive is about as “loud” as the factory-installed original — maybe even a bit quieter. (Which is to say, I can hear it “thinking” sometimes when it’s doing heavy processing, but otherwise, I don’t notice it at all.) It’s certainly nothing compared to how loud the SuperDrive can get when it’s doing its thing.