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A couple of months ago I noticed my laptop, called avalanche, was starting to behave erratically. That is, on wake-up from hibernation or just a cold boot-up the BIOS would randomly choose a different boot device.
I spent a chunk of time checking out my hard drive connection and making sure the guts of my system were doing all right through visual inspection and software tests (hdparm, SMART, etc.). In the end, I can pretty much chalk the problems with the thing up to the BIOS itself.
At this point, I thought to reflash it, but I was also coming to the realization that maybe it was time for this one to go. It wasn’t just the BIOS issue though. The built-in wireless has also been on the fritz for far longer than I’ve had the BIOS issue. In the end, I was upset at the useful lifespan of avalanche.
Avalanche is an Averatec 3715EH1. It’s definitely a budget laptop, but I got a lot of bang for my buck and it was compact. That being said, I did probably get exactly what I paid for in that it started exhibiting problems sooner than the old Dell I had before it (and which I still use in a backup sort-of role).
About a month ago, I bought a new Dell laptop to replace avalanche. I agonized a lot about what I wanted in a new laptop and ended up getting an XPS M1330. It’s not quite as a light as avalanche, but it is thin (not Macbook Air thin, but pretty thin).
I’m pretty satisfied so far, not to mention all of the hardware in it works pretty much out of the box with Debian. I’ll post more on some other laptop lessons I learned later. Oh yeah, I named the new one rockslide.