My wife had an old Compaq 610 laptop during her college days which was lying around and had not been switched on for past 2 years. Its battery was dead and the screen hadn't survived a fall from a desk during its heydays. One afternoon during this long weekend in Hyderabad (8 April-10 April), when I didn't have anything better to do, I pulled out the dusty laptop bag from the cupboard where it had been laid to rest. Remarkably all the paperwork and receipts were well preserved in the bag along with the laptop. The receipt said that it was bought in 2010, was sporting a Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 3 GB DDR2 RAM and 1 TB HDD. It didn't have a HDMI port just a VGA one. It certainly is not a beast according to current standards but not completely useless too. Obviously I embarked on the salvage mission like any self-respecting engineer would do. I pulled out the dead battery, plugged in the charger cable directly and switched on the laptop. A blue LED flickered and the la
Musings on life and software development