New Laptop Hard Drive

On Friday afternoon, just one week after getting my laptop back from Dell's repair depot, the hard drive died. I had removed it from the laptop prior to shipping it to Dell, so this was not their fault. It's still covered under their warranty, of course, but my upcoming trip to London ruled out any possibility of sending it back to them for repair. So, on Saturday afternoon I drove up to visit with Andrew Pollack, stopping at a computer store along the way to confirm the diagnosis and pick up a new drive. Andrew provided a cool head, a faster network than my own (the wired portion of mine is all 10 Mbit because I've still got a thinnet segment running between floors) preloaded with lots of the software I was going to need to restore, and some cool toys that we could use to make a last ditch (but ultimately futile) attempt to get at the data on the dead drive. Fortunately, my data loss was minimal because as soon as noticed the drive acting badly (I could hear it seeking madly) I backed up everything that was important. I ended up losing a few GIFs and my bookmarks from the past few weeks, but that's all.. except of course for time. It's taken most of two days to get everything put back the way I want it. On the other hand, I've got a little more disk space now, and the system is cleaner. It's also on XP SP2 now. Since I had to install everything from scratch, it just made sense to do that.