5 year old laptop

[sak]

My Dell Inspiron 6000 is 5 years old. So far it works pretty good. There is some over heating problem and there is noise like I remember hearing from really old desktop computers back in 2000. Sort of something rotating accelerating and decelerating.

I bought it when I was in graduate school doing some computational work so it has good configuration and it will serve me good during financial engineering studies.

But, it scares me to think that it is a machine waiting to die and disaster can strike anytime. Is it time to get a new one or should I keep it as long as it works?

 

[alain]

as long as you backup what you need and the laptop does what you need it to do, you are going to be fine.

 

[Eugene Krel]

having your primary computer die from age is pretty freaking annoying. You can probably pick up a nice netbook for under $500 that will do what you need it to.

 

[joel_b]

just get a glyph drive or something similar and setup a nightly back up your system, there is probably software for PC that does this a s a full snapshot, at least there is on mac (Carbon Copy Cloner)