Death of a lap top

My trusty old laptop is no longer so trusty. After switching on and the appearance of all the menus, neither the wireless mouse and touch pad work. It doesn't respond to any of the keys on the keyboard, eitehr. I think it's something to do with the McAfee Security system. There is a limited period of time when the mouse does work erratically and I can click on some of the icons but as soon as the McAfee symbol appears everything grinds to a halt.

This Acer laptop is coming up to 3 years old but, as you can see, I have used it so much in that time that I've worn away the silver finish on the leading edge. I added numerous pieces of software to read to allow me to build my own website and create my own videos. I also added a PCMCIA card and a wireless mouse and keyboard. But about this time last year it was apparent that I had found the limits of what this machine could do so I replaced it with my desktop. It was still useful to have the laptop around that, in addition to not processing videos images or not producing PDF documents of a sufficiently high quality that Lightning Source could use them, my laptop became more and more erratic.

After months of nervous and irrational behaviour, my laptop has become frozen with terrified inactivity. It's withdrawn into its shell and it's looking progressively less likely that I'll ever be able to communicate with it again, let alone anything sensible out of it.

I've used it as a backup but now it seems that I can only pull out one or two menus before the McAfee logo kicks in and the mouse and keyboard become inoperative. The files still exist but I just can't get them.

Now, before you say that I should've backed everything up to a separate server, I must point out that I had indeed backed up the most important files already. Inevitably, I was only part way through that process so I would still like to access some of these files on the old laptop but it is not such a loss if I can't get to them ever again. The only thing of any significance than I'd like to hack back into is the address list in Microsoft Outlook. This was forming up as an embryonic mailing list that I could use in the (cue ironic satire) pre-publicity media blitz for The Wormton Lamb

I still think of it as my new laptop. It's the only laptop I've ever had and will probably be the only one having found their capabilities so restrictive. In the same way that I treat my old cars, I would have liked to have kept this old thing going, almost indefinitely. But that's not so easy with It and it's looking like it's shortly become just another bit of WEEE - Waster Electronic and Electrical Equipment.

For the time being, I will keep it by me. A future opportunity may arise when it can be revived from the silicon equivalent of cryogenic storage.