Will it be resurrected or recycled?

My home computer, that is! It's about 8 or 9 years old, but I've upgraded it a time or two. Yesterday morning, it wouldn't turn on at all. The hard drive has been bumping up on "full" warnings for quite some time...strange to think that a 40-gigabyte hard drive could fill up so easily. I know it's quite a small drive compared to what is routine now, with some drives measured in terabytes...but I still remember how excited I was in 1990 to get my first hard drive. A whole 40 megabytes! And at the time I thought, I'll never fill up a drive that large! Now I have a 500-gig external drive. And that's filling up!

The computer had a couple of other strange episodes recently, too. One day a couple of weeks ago, I plugged in the camera to download some pix, and suddenly got a message on my screen "the device has failed." Didn't say which device, but I had to restart. Then a couple of days ago, I plugged in an iPod to recharge it, and the same thing happened. Had to restart once again. Last Friday I turned the computer off (usually I just let it run) because I knew I'd be away from it a couple of days. Then yesterday morning, it was like there was no power to the computer at all. Checked all connections, switches, etc. but no good...so it's off to the repair shop.

My go-to tech guy has the thing at his place, analyzing. He'll let me know if a memory upgrade and a larger hard drive will keep me going awhile, or if it's best to just start from scratch. One of these days I'm going the Apple route. Used to have a Mac when I worked at NAMB, and liked the experience, but PCs are just so much cheaper.