Beat the break
Earlier this week, I happened to find some donationware that does something useful (for me). The package tests the hard drive(s) in your computer, including the S.M.A.R.T. parameters, and awards your drive(s) a score. That is: good, caution or fail (I think). One of my drives is now flagged as caution, after more than 56,000 hours of spin time. That alone is a statistic that surprised me, although it shouldn’t. This is not a new laptop, at all.
Now, having worked around servers (the IT kind, not restaurant people), I take that caution warning seriously. Happily, Amazon should have a new drive here, early next week. I’ll do a transfer via a nifty hardware dongle that I bought some years ago, and life will continue. Much better than waking up to a failed laptop (although next week now seems VERY FAR away).
I wish I had other software like this. Knowing that my household appliances are on the brink of failure would be a good thing. We did have a fridge die just before the long weekend some years back, and it required a lot of ingenuity on our part. Oh, and that freezer that failed, just before a long weekend. Is there a trend, here? Seriously, the appliances are the big ticket items in most households, and being able to proactively shop for something new would be fun for all involved. Come on, manufacturers. You know what to do, and if you handle this right I will buy again with a happy heart, rather than an angry one. You do want that repeat business, don’t you?
