i've had a lot of bad luck with storage over the last few days and it's probably going to be a few days, if not longer, before it gets entirely fixed. i'm typing this from a compaq evo that was manufactured in the 90s, that's missing half it's keys and in all honesty probably belongs in a museum.

but note that it still boots. that's better than i can say for two far newer laptops that are even made by the same company. proof that everything was better in the 90s? fuck, this thing has *rust* on it. laptops with rust is a weird idea, but think of it like a reliable old chevy. it was probably actually even manufactured on this continent.

i even have an old quantum fireball drive that came with windows '98 on it that still boots. yet, the hard drive in the fancy windows 7 machine that my dad left me imploded after less than a year. it's not that we can't do better than this, it's that it isn't profitable to make electronics that don't break after a year. it's fucking pathetic, really.

it started yesterday when one of my usb drives just snapped. nothing out of the ordinary happened, it just disintegrated - almost as though it was timed to fritz out after the first. it might actually have been designed that way. engineers actually take full credit courses in a concept called "forced obsolescence". they spend as much time designing things to break as they do designing things to work. because profit. it's fucking pathetic.

i snapped the plastic off and the solder just gave way. nothing complicated about it, no fault on my behalf - it was just designed to break. just cheap garbage.

this morning, i take the laptop out of sleep (as mentioned, it's practically brand new) and the video spazzes out into static to reveal a blank screen. wait. fuck. reboot. nothing. memory is fine, but the hard drive test is failing. again, there was no strain on the device. worse, it came with no warning - it wasn't clicking or whirring or buzzing. it's almost like it has a timer in it....

i'm running it through a chkdsk right now, which should hopefully be done by the end of the week, and it looks like, in the end, i may get away with a corrupt boot sector and a reinstall; hard to say at this point, but it appears like i may be able to partition out the bad part. but, there's no reason for this. it's just badly designed (accidentally on purpose) garbage.

the laptop is sort of gravy. it was a gift, to replace one that came to me on a grant (another compaq with another dead hard drive). if i can't get it back up, it just means i'll have to get that router fixed sooner than later. it's not devastating.

in the mean time, it's this museum piece with 650 MB of obsolete RAM that is the one that's still kicking - rusty joints and all. and hp/compaq should be fucking embarrassed about that. except not. 'cause profit.