Today, for the first time in more than three years, my old Sony Vaio laptop booted.
This is the laptop I used during the waning days of my undergraduate degree and throughout my time at Brooks-Jeffrey Marketing in Mountain Home. And actually, now that I look at some of the files, it was also heavily used during my days at Arkansas for my first master’s.
At some point during my time in Fayetteville (or perhaps shortly after I moved back to Mountain Home, albeit briefly), though, my laptop’s AC adapter gave out (this wasn’t entirely without precedent for this particular Vaio), and the replacement I ordered never worked.
Today, during Daniel’s cord sorting fun, he ran across two cords that looked similar; each had an AC plug on one end and a connector on the other end quite reminiscent of the Vaio’s AC cube. Lo and behold, when I plugged the first one into the block and hooked the other end to the wall, the yellow “I’m charging” light illuminated on the Vaio… like magic! I let out a little squeal of joy and explained to Daniel what a coup this is!
The laptop is a Pentium MMX (I remember when that was SUCH a big deal) running at 166, with 32 MB of RAM and a 1.87 (ish) gig hard drive. Since it was purchased sometime in 1998, I figure those are pretty good stats. I mean, it IS a laptop and it IS about seven years old (give or take). I had to fix the system date, but once I did that, it booted like a champ and is running great. Granted, it IS running Windows 95… but, it’s doing well.
I am reluctant to sell the laptop, simply because it is still functioning well, so I think we’re going to reformat the hard drive and install Win98 second edition on it, and keep it around for guests to use in the guest bedroom. We’ll get a wireless card for it (to add to its existing card/dongle/ethernet adapter) so people visiting can at least check their e-mail and browse the internet with relative ease and mobility. It might also be a good “lounging by the pool” laptop, since it is so old and wouldn’t represent a major loss if something unfortunate happened to it.
If nothing else (and this may not seem like much, but bear with me), being able to boot the darned thing at least lets me put to rest the fears I’ve had for all these years (and the underlying reason I’ve held on to the unusable laptop) — I *do*, in fact, have copies of all the files on the laptop. So had I never been able to get to it again, I wouldn’t have actually lost any data. I’m *really* grateful for that.
Anyway, YAY!