My brother is starting university in September. His current PC is more than 5 years old. The very day he placed the order for a new laptop, the power supply on his old Dell Dimension desktop spontaneously exploded in a shower of sparks. Perhaps it detected itself being used to order a non-Dell machine and couldn’t take the humiliation?

If there’s one thing you can say about Dells, it’s that the core components tend to be excellent, but the peripherals fall apart soon after purchase. My Inspiron 8000 laptop from 2001 has an optical drive that won’t write CDs any more, a floppy that has never worked, a battery that lasts less than 5 minutes, a completely broken trackpad, a PS/2 port that causes violent kernel panics when anything is plugged into it, an empty hole where the built-in ethernet card that should’ve been there was never installed in the first place, and a spacebar on the keyboard that proves I’m right-handed. However, the essential components are all in top-notch condition. I still love the screen - it never developed any more dead pixels than the one that came with it, which I never notice since it’s way down at the bottom.

Amazingly enough, after literally blowing the dust out of the never-used firewire port, an external hard drive in a cheap no-name caddy worked first time with no setup. Debian even automounts it properly.

I’d quite like a new machine when I come back to uni in September, but I don’t think I’m likely to find one that can match this one’s best feature: absolutely silent operation. Well, maybe there’s a small fizzing hum from the hard drive, but it’s quieter than a person breathing. All modern boxen seem to be 20% CPU and 80% cooling mechanism. Nevertheless, I think this year will be an excellent time to upgrade: all the new dual-core stuff will drive single-core CPU prices way down. The trick is to buy a cheap single-core Athlon before everyone figures out that dual-core has all the (major) problems of dual-CPU and the hype wears off.

Whatever I end up with (even if it’s sticking with this laptop for another year (woo and yay for running modern software on ancient hardware!)) I hope I can at least be assured that it won’t spontaneously self-destruct.