The Life and Times of my hp ze5170

November 7, 2008 - Filed Under: News - 1 comment

Today is a sad day for me.  ze5170, my six year old hp laptop has finally passed on.  He was with me through thick and thin, good times and bad.  It all started shortly after my high school graduation in June of 2002….

I was just like every other middle class graduating senior, I received my fair share of graduation cards and checks and presents, and with my graduation money I decided to purchase ze5170.  It was a great day for both of us.  I took him from the lonely shelf of a local Best Buy, away from the torturous salesmen who were too busy dreaming up new ways to rip off unsuspecting customers with one of those “premium protection plans”.  ze5170 and I went home and started our time together.

At first it was the typical computer to person relationship, I’d power him on when I needed him and leave him be when I wasn’t surfing the net.  But things soon changed as I started classes at OU that fall.  ze5170 was no longer just for my entertainment, him and I wrote countless papers and completed hours of engineering projects; so much typing that his keys are shiny smooth from wear to this day.  Before long I just started bringing him with me to class since I always seemed to need him.

Throughout our time at college, ze5170 went through the usual aging process, and he required repairs and got some upgrades on more than one occasion:

• early on, while he was still under warranty, his optical drive failed, so I fixed him up with a new one
• after my first year with him he got a RAM upgrade from 512MB to 1GB
• in his second year we replaced his battery with a newer high capacity one
• shortly after ze5170′s third birthday his original hard-drive failed, so he got another similar one (same 40GB capacity)
• after a solid two years with no problems, ze5170 and I were out of college and out in the workforce when his graphics card fan came loose and started flopping around inside of him – this prompted his first major surgery to get to the fan, but in the end just required snapping it back into place
• finally in his sixth year of life him and I had our first major battle – he lost his second hard-drive and took with it about a month’s worth of code, web designs, financial data, and who knows what else – luckily for him a ridiculous trick of putting the hard-drive in the freezer actually worked and allowed me to get all my data back
• after the hard-drive debacle we replaced his drive with a tiny 20GB drive from a Creative mp3 player about the same age has ze5170

So we’ve had quite a good six years together, and I was kind of content just to keep on going and see how long it would last, but suddenly a couple of days ago ze5170 just shut down right in the middle of some normal budget work.

With the cryptic last words “System Restarted – CRC Error,” ze5170 passed on.  After a bit of Googling, I attempted rudimentary CPR by running a memtest on him, and sure enough there were failures all over the place.  With ze5170 bleeding out, I order a 512MB stick of RAM to hold him over, but when it arrived I got the same results.  It seems his motherboard has stopped mother-boarding.

Time of death: 9:34 p.m. 11/7/2008

May ze5170 rest in peace.

Please leave your condolences in the comments.

Josh Josh, tech