My computer hard drive just failed. The bloody thing was nice enough to barely give me sufficient warning for a quick save of my book files to an external drive, and to make a disc image of the hole failing drive just in case.

Then it became sluggish, and pouf. Gone.

So now I am wondering if owning a Dell is a blessing or an omen. Something major was just wrong with the machine a few weeks ago. I had a chat online with a Dell representative at 2 PM one afternoon. The next day, by 5 PM, the parts had been Fedexed overnight to a local tech and he was showing up here to install them. He changed the motherboard, power supply, heat sink and fans. Everything was then peachy.

Until today. Windows suddenly warned me it had detected an imminent hard drive failure, “Contact your computer manufacturer” was the grim recommendation. I did.

Five minutes on a chat window again, a new hard drive is being shipped, should be here in 2 to 3 days. I’ll install it myself, and hope to be able to use the image to restore my complete current content. If not… Headache.

So, what should I think? On one hand, Dell has been extremely swift and efficient with support issues while my PC is under warranty. On the other, that’s two major failures within less than a month, and within six months of purchase. Was it a lemon? Is it just bad luck?

Oh well. I’ll just have to read more for a couple of days. Or try and beat yet another personal running record. As it stands, I’ve run some 270 km in the last 2 1/2 months. I was shooting for 300 in that time but have a nasty neck pain that’s slowing me down… Cocorico!

What else can I bore you all with? Oh yeah, the book is on stand-by, obviously, until the new HD gets here and works, because I still need to upload to 200+ Mb file to the printer…

[Written on my poor old broken laptop. A round of applause for the crippled thing!]