My laptop bit the dust on Thursday afternoon.

I was at a client. While there, it kept freezing on me. Pretty soon it would no longer boot, not even in safe mode.

By the time I got home, it was dead. Gone. Finito. There was nothing left to do but tear out its hard drive and move the data to a new laptop.

I feel strangely nostalgic about that computer. And I write that knowing that I never really liked it. In a sentence–it ran Vista–version 1.0. We tried patches and nothing really ever fixed the problem. It buggered up my Blackberry so badly that I could never synchronize my calendars.

It had some positive attributes though.

It weighed just 3 pounds. That’s important to me because I travel everywhere with it and heavy bags bother my shoulder and back.

It had a really cool graphic on the front. It was blackish silver, with a wave sort of pattern; slightly Japanese styling. Lots of people told me they liked it.

That computer enjoyed a fascinating life.

It saw the days before the recession when it seemed like it was involved in endless planning for new business start-ups around the world. It crossed several borders and sometimes ran for 24 hours at a time. In those days, it was me and I was it.

It went out west several times to deal with various projects involving organizations experiencing labour shortages and the resulting pressures on organizational planning and compensation. It was with me on planes where I was seated in the middle row next to an unusual assortment of people who worked in the diamond mines and tar sands. We learned so much about how employment works when you live in Newfoundland and work in Fort MacMurray.

It went to class with me faithfully for nine semesters as I taught various evening courses. It survived the year before the CHRP requirements changed and my classes were filled to capacity and beyond.

It worked on the world’s most complicated spreadsheet (nearly 40 tabs in all!) involving some of the most sophisticated compensation modelling for an incentive plan ever attempted. I don’t think I ever felt smarter than when I created that spreadsheet.

It went with me everywhere. It had more than two dozen regular wireless hotspot connections locations in 3 countries.

It stayed up with me on Saturday nights as that is normally when I write this blog.

Right now it is sitting dismantled on my desk, looking like something in the garbage chute in Star Wars.

Seeing it like that, I almost feel like a Trill. A Trill is a being from the TV show Deep Space Nine. Trills are really two entities. One is a Humanoid and the other is a Symbiont. The Symbiont lives for many generations, while the host lasts only a normal lifetime. I am Jadzia and my computer is Dax.

Dax just changed bodies. Hopefully he has migrated to this new computer.

Long live the old man!