Between A Sustainable Rock And A Hard Drive

Recently I had a problem. One of many but the only one I feel inclined to 'share'. A computer problem.

My 2-year old Macbook was giving up the ghost: painfully slow, crashing regularly, when it didn't crash I had to reboot it, etc. If felt like I was loosing several months of my life waiting for applications to load or the machine to start-up again or that spinning multicoloured wheel of eternity to stop.

Seemingly, the machine couldn't be easily fixed and I was initially advised to just get a new one.

Part of me - the part of me that secretly envies people with newer laptops (I know, I'm working on it) - thought "that's fantastic, what a great justification for getting the new Mac I've quietly been lusting after."

But of course new stuff involves the whole cycle of resources, energy and waste Green Thing is trying to break by inspiring people to Stick With What You Got or be All-Consuming.

Then a genius tech support person who we'll just call 'Bertie' (because that's his name) came up with a genius tech support idea. "I'm going to try swapping your hard drive for an SSD" he said.

I nodded wisely and then looked it up on Wikipedia. "A solid-state drive (SSD) is a data storage device that uses solid-state memory to store persistent data." it said. I nodded wisely to myself and asked Bertie: "What's an SSD?"

Apparently, unlike normal hard drives, an SSD doesn't have any spinning, whirring parts that are relatively fragile and can suffer the sorts of problems I'd been experiencing (and break if you drop them).

"You will probably see some performance improvements too" Bertie said. He wasn't kidding, I feel like I've been given back a super-computer. This is a short comparison of how many seconds it took to load up applications on both machines.

This whole experience has made me very happy. I practised Sticking With What I Got AND got a faster machine in the process. A double-win.

It made me think that someone clever will bring out a tech subscription service soon where you get a machine which is always upgraded with new, clever parts to keep it healthy and performing.

The kind of de-meterialised product where the producer becomes service provider that Interface Carpets pioneered many years ago.

Also, in the future we'll probably have 3D printers in our homes and download the instructions for the parts we need to fix whatever it is that needs fixing (from laptops to furniture). The printer makes it and we fix what we have.

Did I mention the entire system now boots up in 19.4 seconds? ;-)

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