The End of an 8 Year Relationship... With My Laptop.

Yesterday I placed my order on Newegg.com  for my new laptop. Sometime this week a shiny new ASUS N56JR-EH71 will arrive at my doorstep, accompanied by a separate Crucial M500 480GB SSD, which I'll need to install myself.

And that means its finally time to retire my old Fujitsu T4020 Lifebook.

This was literally my first laptop, having only owned desktop systems previously.  I purchased it in January of 2006 to use when I went into real estate. Top of the line at the time, it came with Windows XP Tablet edition, 12.1" screen which rotated into tablet mode, a 2.00GHz Pentium processor, and 2 GB of RAM. Being a tablet hybrid it also had a stylus which I employed for signing contracts sans paper. (Which was both impressive and annoying to my clients.)

This thing has seem some wear and tear in it's day. My last stylus disappeared about three years ago. I've dropped it several times, onto both carpeted and hard surfaces.  The clasp that locks the screen into a closed position snapped off last year. The casing is cracked around the audio/microphone jacks. The LCD display for the battery life has a cracked section as well - which doesn't really matter since the batteries (internal plus expansion if you take out the optical drive) only last 15 minutes anyway. And when playing video or even loading a script-heavy web page, the long-suffering fan grinds its way up to max RPM's while issuing a surprisingly loud and gritty sounding groan of protest.

I once tried to disassemble it in order to clean out all the dust that is clogging up that fan unit.  I had to admit defeat after I still could not pry it apart with 27 screws out.

Admittedly, I pretty much only use it now when the TV is on and I need a larger screen than my phone affords me for secondary surfing. So not very often.  Still, to be in working (mostly) order without ever having a major hardware failure, and outliving Microsoft support of it's OS, I really have to hand it to that heavy little Fujitsu. You weren't cheap, but you gave me eight good years which is more I can say for any other computer I've owned.

I'll miss you buddy.