My Toshiba A45-S250, an otherwise fine laptop which I love, started acting up a bit last night.
My wife reported a lot of apps crashing randomly and a BSoD. It sounds a lot like a problem I was having several months ago where the fan was not coming on when it was supposed to and things were getting very hot. I purchased an extended warranty at the time and then strangely the problems went away 🙂
This time I began copying documents on to my Maxtor OneTouch II 300 GB drive as a precaution in case it dies completely or I have to send it out for repairs. I might also reimage the sucker and then put apps back one by one to get rid of the accumulated gunk from all of the software that I’ve experimented with. This time I’d love to install all the stuff that I use – XP SP2, Microsoft Office, Firefox, Thunderbird, PuTTY, WinSCP, SlickRun, Yahoo! Messenger, IrfanView, iTunes, PDFCreator, MultiTimer, YAC, Cygwin, Quick Zip, TreeSize – and then use an imaging program such as Ghost to create a baseline image.
Anybody want to recommend an imaging program? It seems that Ghost was at one time a popular choice in corporate IT, but I seem to recall reading a magazine review that was extolling the virtues of Drive Image (made by PowerQuest, which was acquired by Symantec in December of 2003) over Ghost. But when I did a search for Drive Image, even the link on PowerQuest’s page is a redirect to Ghost, saying “Now with Drive Image-technology!”.
If you play around a lot with different software, you might give vmware a try just so don’t have to go through the hassle of reinstalling the OS to get rid of junk.