Saying Good-bye to an Old Computer

It was quite a shock when this old computer "died" a few days ago. I tried to turn it on, but something prevented it from opening windows... an update perhaps. (I no longer allowed updates as they weren't usually compatible with Windows XP, but sometimes they occur automatically.) I tried to reinstall the program, but was informed that the disk had been corrupted. At that point I turned it off for the last time.

I shouldn't lament - it's about 11 years old - long past the time most computers are used. It was my son's - bought with money he earned at McDonald's during his high school years. I had bought one in 1999 - so that it would work in the new millineum... (Remember our worries about Y2K...?)


















But it wasn't fast enough for the games he wanted to play. Come to think of it, I still have the old computer we used before this one... I wonder if it still works!














After buying our first laptop - so that we wouldn't have to sit in the basement to use the computer - I went down there and used it mainly to type letters. Hooked up to our printer, it holds our Christmas letters and family resumes of the past decade.

Now that it has totally stopped working, I wonder if I should try to remove the hard drive and retrieve all that data - or simply rely on hard copies that are lying around. I may have made a backup of some of the important documents a while back, in anticipation of this day. (But I'm not sure!)

Part of me wants to go to the expense of taking it to a repair depot to see if the hard drive can be removed and put into a hard drive reader... But would we ever use it?!

I remember spending hours carefully removing all the data from my hard drive space at work before I retired. And I don't think I've looked at it since!