I added some pictures to the christening entry.
I am almost finished restoring the hard drive of my Gateway laptop. I've had this computer since June of 1999. I picked it out for me to use when I worked at Avenues. I liked it so much that when I left Avenues, I bought the system. I am very attached. So my heart sank when about a week ago, my hard drive started making that dreaded click noise whenever it would boot up or shut down. It wasn't bad... at first, just a little click. But even though I pretended that everything was fine, I knew deep inside that my hard drive was no long for this world. The noise grew worse and more painful to listen to as the week went on. "Hold on, little platters and spindles," I would silently pray, hoping that this time wouldn't be the time that it seized up.
I panicked and went to my boss to ask about buying a new laptop for me to use at work. I had just bought 5 Dell Inspirons for our salespeople and thought that I could muddle by with one of those. I figured that I'd try to make the same deal to buy the laptop if and when I left here. He kind of looked at me and said "Sure, you can get another system, but I'm kind of surprised that you aren't going to even try to fix it. You fix everything else around here." And it's true. Whenever anyone tries to throw something out, I always grab it and take it apart. Much of the time I can fix it. What's more, I became a little embarrassed. I mean, I wouldn't think twice about at least making the attempt to swap out a hard drive on any other system. I sheepishly agreed with him and said I would see what Gateway had to say about replacing the hard drive.
Duh. Of course, it was still under the 3 year warranty. They send me out a replacement drive that day. I've been copying all my stuff over to our servers so I can pull it back onto the new drive. Oh, I discovered something that seems to make a difference in keeping the drive alive. Instead of shutting down Windows 2000, I put it in hibernation. For some reason, I don't hear the horrible clicking and grinding when I hibernate the drive. I had another "duh" moment when I was faced with transferring all the MP3s I ripped from CDs. It was taking forever to copy them over to either a Zip Drive or onto our servers. I was trying to think of a different way to back them up when it hit me. I had them backed up already. I had them on CD. They came from CDs! They are sitting at home right now waiting to be restored by ripping them again... dork.
So two good things could come of this. One, my boss will see that I am saving money and I might be able to use this to get a good system down the road. And B, I always like to start from a fresh Windows installation every 12 to 18 months anyway. I wasn't exactly prepared to do it this week, but now it's basically done and my system runs so much better right now.
