I wonder if there is any empirical evidence that the end of a school year drives any shopping behavior associated with the return of campus notebooks to the home environment. I have two kids home from college, both carrying Lenovo Thinkpads (A Z60 and an R60) and both need some serious hard disk sanitation work.
Being a cheapskate, lesson learned the hard way: “Max out the harddrive when purchasing a laptop that is going to school.” The sheer volume of media files, games, and assorted crud is astonishing and will fill all available storage at the worst possible time: namely right before finals when papers need to be written and the mission critical scenario of cramming kicks in.
So, home come these sick and bloated machines and I find myself ready to:
- Buy ultrafast, ultra-high volume hard drives.
- Buy an external drive with enough capacity to perform the transfer and rebuild of the OS on the new notebook drive.
- Potentially replace keyboards if I detect any crud or spillage.
- Buy more RAM? Maybe …
- Not buy replacement screens like I had to do last summer.
- Consider padded sleeves
- Even consider NQA replacement plans because I am paranoid and my kids haven’t yet met a notebook they couldn’t accidentally destroy
So, note to self. Push a “Back from School Sale” for accessories and parts.
