Sigh. The hard drive in my (well, it belongs to my employer, but it lives in my hot little hands) laptop is, as we techies like to say, “toast”. I first noticed the worst symptom (Windows dying with a BSOD when I tried to boot the machine) on the plane, when Em and I were on our way to Florida last month. But it was intermittent, and I couldn’t pin it on the hard drive. But just the other night, after searching in vain for problems at the software, driver, or operating system level, I booted into the Dell diagnostic utilities (very handy, those), and confirmed that there were manymany “bad blocks” (read: dead zones) on the drive. Yuck.
The good news is that the machine is only 1 year into a 3-year “Gold” warranty, and Dell Support doesn’t argue with the results of their own diagnostic utility, so after a reasonably quick phone call a replacement drive is already on its way here. The bad news is that I may have lost some data (it’ll take a long time to cross-check the entire disk to see which, if any, of the “dead zones” on it are located in places where my data would otherwise have been, as opposed to places where programs are stored, or empty space, or such), and I’m probably going to lose a few nights and most of this weekend to the process of moving all of my data/settings/etc off this drive, rebuilding my system after dropping in the new drive, and then re-installing and re-tweaking all of my applications and moving all of my data back. And yes, I’m very familiar with Ghost, but given the number of bad blocks I don’t feel comfortable simply setting up the new drive as an exact mirror image of this one – it’s safer to start from scratch and build a clean machine. Actually, it’s a ritual I usually engage in every 12-18 months, so I guess I can’t complain. Even if my drive hadn’t failed, I’d probably be sacrificing a weekend to a system rebuild sooner or later. I just hope I haven’t lost any data. Good thing I make lots of backups…
Come to think of it, I’m also slated to rebuild at least two more systems… I just ordered a sweet new motherboard, CPU (Athlon XP 2600+), cooler/fan, and 1 GB of RAM, to replace the same-but-older components in my current desktop machine. The replaced components, in turn, will “trickle down” to the media PC that I set up in the library. I’d recycled an old Pentium III (at 450 MHz) into a media PC by tossing in an old DVD drive, my old ATI All-In-Wonder card, and the like. It works well for MP3s and the like, but the box is having a really hard time keeping up with some of the things I’m asking it to do. Specifically, a lot of DVDs are skipping and pausing as we try to watch them on it. Rrebuilding it around my old desktop core (Athlon XP 1800+) ought to set things right. Besides, with her shiny new Dell Pentium 4 box (at 2.4 MHz, no less), Em arguably has the fastest machine in the house, which just ain’t right. Ya feel me? My new system core ought to restore some balance to the universe. 
In slightly less geeky news, because it involves TRAVEL, which usually involves GOING OUTSIDE, this site is very cool. Go check it out. What’s particularly cool about it is that in addition to merely checking it out, you can quite readily contribute to it.
