2 weeks ago, I had one of the worst experiences a programmer can have – my primary hard drive crashed! My good friend, Aaron Zupancic, has actually had this happen several times it’s extremely frustrating and really quite scary! I lost an incredible amount of stuff that I was stupid enough to not have backed up. Well, I’m past all that now. After a solid week of reloading, reconfiguring and actually recovering some stuff from my hard drive (did you know that if you freeze a failed hard drive you have a chance of retrieving some data?) – I was able to get my email folders (about 6 years worth of email stored, all my account information, my contact list etc), my favorites (again, several years worth of organizing and storing web locations) and some of my password files – but NONE of my work! So I spent time re-doing work as well.
The only good thing that came out of this is that it forced me to buy a new laptop (I believe the hard drive controller failed on the laptop first). I usually buy a new one once a year. The last several have been Toshibas and this was no exception. I bought the Toshiba P35-S605 and I’m very happy with it! The 17 inch wide screen is great and extremely bright. It has a 100 gig hard drive in it and I’ve upgraded it to 1 gig of RAM. Now that it’s all configured and I can work on it, things are very much looking up! I just wish I could have bought a new laptop without going through all that pain!
