After 4½ years, I think my netbook is dead

I’ve been getting the Blue Screen of Death with increasing frequency on my Dell Inspiron Mini 9 netbook and find I am unable to reinstall Windows XP.

It appears the 64 GB RunCore solid state hard drive I installed last November is hosed. It crapped out on me during the European Riders Rally in June, causing me to have to reinstall WinXP. Now, it won’t even let me do that.

The little 9” netbook came with a pathetic 8 GB SSD, which I upgraded with a 32 GB RunCore SSD. When the 32 GB RunCore crapped out, I got it replaced under warranty. Then, late last year, the second 32 GB drive failed.

It appears that RunCore makes the only half-way decent SSDs for the Mini 9 and my experience leads me to believe RunCore drives are dogshit.

Steve Gibson, the creator of SpinRite, says SSDs aren’t prone to the physical fuckups that plague regular hard drives and is on record as saying there is no need to run SpinRite on an SSD. That said, I’m going to give it a shot, just to see what happens.

Beyond that, I guess I’m in the market for a replacement for everyday use and motorcycle blogging.

Maybe four years is pretty good for a $245 netbook with another couple hundred bucks worth of upgrades, but I kinda hoped it would last longer.

I thought SSDs were the future of portable computers, being supposedly less vulnerable to vibration, but 4 SSDs later, it doesn’t seem so.