A Farewell to Big Red

First, the public service announcement: Rhoades to Madness may – MAY – go on a week’s hiatus.

The reason is a little sad but inevitable. My laptop is dying by degrees.

It’s a Toshiba Qosmio X305, and it has served me faithfully for more than four years. Its flashy red exterior wasn’t quite to my liking, but a good deal is a good deal, and I’ve grown to like it over the years. I named the laptop “Joan” after Christina Hendricks’s character on Mad Men to help me assimilate all that red. My Joan has seen and done a lot of things, it even visited Venice, California with me in 2011. But all good things must come to an end, especially in the world of technology.

Over the last two or three weeks, Joan has become less and less reliable. Gaming became impossible long before that as the GPU started overheating and shorting out, but the problem has now spread to even when the computer is just idling. Random shutdowns are becoming more and more frequent, and getting it to start back up is chancy at best.

A replacement has been ordered – an Alienware M18x laptop – but it won’t arrive until the 28th. And ol’ Joan may not live to see that day, the way it’s acting. I’ll try and build a little post buffer to finish out this week and start next, but I really don’t know when it might go offline for good.

Either way, I and RtM will be back on the 28th for sure, just missing one obnoxiously red but great old companion.

 

And now, the only funeral fit for a geek’s computer…

 

Of my friend I can say only this: Of all the laptops I have encountered on my travels…hers was the most…red…