My six year old Dell Inspiron 1100 laptop has been a faithful friend. Oh, we’ve had our ups and downs, but for the most part it has been a workhorse. A couple years ago I upgraded to a bigger/faster harddrive and maxed out the internal memory. For the past year it has gotten dragged to work everyday, and back home at night.

Last Christmas the monitor went out, and I was lucky to find one on eBay which was mis-labelled as the smaller monitor, when I could tell from the picture it was the larger one. So I got it for a steal and replaced my broken monitor. Then this year the power adapter went bad and we found replacements for $6. Then the battery gave up and it turns out the laptop won’t work without a somewhat functioning battery, even if it’s plugged in. So we replaced that, and it kept plugging along.

A couple weeks ago the fan gave a sad little squeel and quit. Without the fan the laptop could only run for a couple minutes at a time without overheating. Once again to eBay, where I found a new fan and heatsink combo. While waiting for it to arrive I pulled the laptop apart.

There’s a view I’ve seen all too often. The fan is on the right, and the CPU is under it, just to the left.

Yay – long live the Inspiron!

When I bought this laptop I was thinking it was going to be a sort of throwaway computer. My last couple desktops had grown obsolete so quickly, and I knew that laptops were even less upgradable than desktops. So when we bought it we bought the cheapest one available. It has been a great little computer, and thanks to the pages of information on the internet, as well as the easy accessability of parts on eBay, it is going to continue to be a workhorse for a little while longer. I can’t complain about the six years of use I’ve gotten out of it so far.