We'll miss you, computer.

Seven years isn't a bad run for a low-end desktop. But everything dies eventually, and the old Celeron-based eMachines desktop that's lived under Katy's desk since before university had its turn last night.

No viruses, here. No trojans, toolbars, keyloggers or other malware either, for that matter. The little beast was still on its original load of WinXP Home. Not bad for a computer that's seen as much use as this one has. No, this was purely a hardware issue, as the photos below will show.

Can you see what's gone wrong?

An engineer's eye will be immediately drawn to those fat, juicy electrolytic capacitors (the black cylinders capped with metal discs). More than a few of them have become a little fatter and a little less juicy. The foil tops have split open, the electrolyte is leaking and drying out, and they can no longer do their job of damping out fluctuations in the DC power being fed to the CPU and other system components. This is an inherent flaw of electrolytic capacitors; they have a finite life, and in this application are usually toast in six years or so. (I much prefer the newer solid-state variety, which routinely last 50,000 hours or more; that's 10-12 years or better in typical home service.)

In its early stages, the problem manifests itself as a random, spontaneous system shutdown. The monitor will go black, the audio will die, but the fans and drives will keep on whirring away. On reboot, there will usually be nothing in the system logs to indicate a problem. But it'll happen again, and again, with increasing frequency as the damaged capacitors heat up and deteriorate faster.

There is no cure for this kind of failure. By the time capacitors start cooking en masse, every other component on the motherboard is long since obsolete and replacements are no longer stocked. In this case, we moved both this machine's hard drives to another computer, merged their user files with those of the corresponding users on the new computer, and took new backups. I suppose we could preserve the XP install as a virtual machine, and I just might do that sometime, but it'd probably be more effort than it's worth.

The lessons:

• Keep backups. Multiple backups. On our main Windows 7 desktop, we use SyncToy to take a daily backup of recent work on an external hard drive, and we take a weekly system image using Win7's built-in Backup & Restore. Our WinXP laptop doesn't have much on it, and what it does have is synchronized (SyncToy again) with the corresponding user profiles on the Win7 desktop. Once set up, all of this is automated, and the only manual effort involved is in periodically checking that it's working.
• Everything has a finite life. Plan for it, and have some idea of how to get your stuff back when (not if) the machine breaks down for good.

There isn't much point in replacing the dead machine with another desktop. One powerful workstation is enough to handle all the serious work that two people can throw at it; simple tasks such as Facebook, email and random Web browsing can be done just as easily on an iThing, and a mid-range laptop fills the gap between those machines pretty nicely. This is the mobile age, after all.