Pandora is wheezing

Pandora is wheezing.

No, not the glorious planet in Avatar.

Not even the first human woman the Classical Greek Gods created, the handiwork of Hephaestus and Athena, working to blueprints by Zeus. The gal with the box, you know? The box she couldn't resist opening -- and all the twaddle the world now endures came rushing out of it (which is more than you wanted to know about Greek mythology, right? Incidentally, the image at left is from Wikimedia, captioned and credited thusly: "Swedish soprano Christine Nilsson as Pandora by Alexandre Cabanel. The Walters Art Museum." Used here according to their "fair usage" agreement.)

Nope. The Pandora to whom (or which) I refer is a Dell Inspiron notebook, and it's ... wheezing. It seems to have major overheat problem: yes, it's sitting on a powerful laptop cooler -- it's been sitting on one for over five years now, so I've been nursing it for a long, long time. It also has a powerful little desktop fan sitting 3cms away, blowing right on the left side of the case, and under it, which is where these computers gets hot. So I'm doing everything possible to keep her cool, but I have the strongest intuition, she's going to be in the workshop very soon; because it's still far cheaper to fix a cooling unit than it is to replace the whole laptop/notebook --

We were at OfficeWorks (same thing as OfficeMax in the States) just last week ... actually getting archive boxes and a printer cartridge, but I took the time out to look at prices as I went by. Hmm. Most modern notebooks seem to be pretending to be tablets. They all have teeny-tiny little screens, 11" -- just a whisker bigger than the screen on your average iPad. Gak.

This ol' laptop has a 15" screen -- and I need that.Yes, you can still get a laptop with a bigger screen, but they cost around a thousand dollars, which is out of my price bracket at the moment; and the laptops falling inside my price bracket are all pretending to be tablets. Omigod. It's perfect.

So -- a couple of hundred bucks for a new cooling unit sounds like the best way to go. I spent the whole day, Monday, running diagnostic tools, and was really sweating by the end of the work, fearing this machine would melt itself down before it finished an eight-hour checkdisk routine. It survived those rigors, but today the cooling fans are kicking in every few seconds for no reason whatever. Yep. Time to go to the nice repair man and get fixed...

Wouldn't it be wonderful if people could be fixed the same way? We're not even going to talk about my back today!