I had a colleague a few years ago who was a computer fanatic but he always said, "Computers will never catch on; they're too complicated." I have to admit I agree with him.
Friday night I noticed the speakers on my computer were not working (the desktop, not the laptop). I did some troubleshooting but didn't come up with anything. On Saturday, after fiddling with it a little more, I fired up a chat session with Dell Tech Support. Believe it or not there was a wait time of zero minutes. It was instantaneous! After a brief discussion, the tech suggested I run some diagnostics on the hard drive (why didn't I think of that!?). We suspended the chat for me to run the diags. Interestingly the hard drives passed the first tests so I dug a little further and then drive errors started popping up everywhere.
My first thought was that the drive was falling apart as I watched, so I immediately began off-loading my important files (okay, my life) to an external drive. I then off-loaded the less essential stuff. After that I contacted Dell via chat again. Unfortunately this wait was a little longer...three hours. However, it took about two minutes for us to agree that the hard drive was toast and Dell is sending me a new one.
I tend to be a little impatient so I went out Saturday night and bought a new drive, a bigger one, and installed it. I was able to clone the image of the old drive and on Sunday was able boot from the new drive. The sound problem was still there so I did the old uninstall the software/reinstall the software trick and now it is all working. When the new disk Dell arrives I'll use it to replace my secondary drive. My fear was that I was going to have to do a complete reinstall of Windows which would then beg the question of upgrading to Vista or not. The real concern was not so much reinstalling Windows XP but of having to reinstall AND reconfigure all of the software I use.
The part that bothers me is that I have to return the old drive to Dell. I can understand why--they don't want people feigning disk trouble just to get an additional disk--but the disk does have data that I worry about getting out. So, I am currently wiping the drive using bcwipe. It should take a day or so to take care of everything but I really am not interested in my tax returns finding their way onto a website somewhere.
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