SSD

Dell fucked me up for the second time. Sigh.. Less than 4 years old and this laptop already killed 2 HDD. I was frustrated when my laptop was acting up again 2 weeks ago. That turned out to be a blessings in disguise: it made me back up most of my data and that made me not as emo as the previous HDD death.

It seems that getting 100% disk when nothing is running is a sign of imminent death of the hard disk. I should take note of this instead of googling and killing all the various applications. Similar to previously, initially I thought a failed Windows Update was the culprit. It was sudden again: the laptop was still working fine in the past two weeks and I was still in the middle of watching videos on Saturday morning when it suddenly became super slow. Restarting a few times did not resolve the slowness and by Sunday morning, it was no longer able to load Windows. Booting up triggered disk check and repair and subsequently, advance troubleshooting which none of the option worked.

I was thinking of using my office laptop to create a Windows installation media but I do not have 8GB and above thumbdrive. I borrowed from my landlord and then I realised my office laptop is secured and preventing me from opening any .exe. After this, the laptop completely died. I had to consider myself lucky because at the very last minute, I still managed to transfer the last bits of the files through notepad that was opened via command prompt. I did not manage to transfer remaining 4 giant folders but I think I should be able to redownload them anyway. 2 of them are Dissidia NT soundtracks that I did not even unzip yet.

I attempted to call the carousell guy who helped me 2 years ago but somehow my message did not go through. I ended up searching and found other service provider with many hundreds good reviews. I contacted 2 and only 1 replied. It was already past midnight so it was lucky that the guy still replied. Based on description of my problem, he was sure that HDD was the issue and advised me to change to SSD.

He was not contactable until yesterday around 6pm. He called me and came down last night. Due to busyness, he only reached me at 1245am. I thought he would return it to me another day but he did it immediately in his car and by 105am, I got my laptop back. I am irritated with myself now because in my rush, I forgot about the protector sheet (between the screen and keyboard). It is a minor thing and I normally only use it when I have to bring my laptop around, which is maybe only once or twice a year when I fly home, so it should affect me that much. Can't help the perfectionist side of me..

I forked up $160 for 250GB SSD and his service. That brought up the total cost for this Dell fucker to $1210 in less than 4 years.

The aftermath of this incident the thought of paying more attention to my portable HDD that I am using as back up. My 1TB wa bought in 2012 (wow! that is more than 7 years old) and is left with 70GB-ish so it is time for me to buy a new one. SSD is almost 4x more expensive than HDD so I am giving myself a break until this weekend to decide with a calmer state of mind. This weekend is May and I need to plan my credit card spending to maximise the points -that is my reason. While searching, I see that 250GB SSD for laptop is below $100 so I actually paid more than $50 for the guy's less than half an hour service -_-"