My primary computer at home is a circa 1997 Dell Inspiron 7000 laptop. It has been a real workhorse, doing everything I expected of it, but last night the hard disk started making the kind of noises you do not want to hear from a hard disk, eventually crashing Windows 2000 with a blue screen.

Now, being a technology geek, I know how to do a hard disk transplant, but the frustrating thing about this is it will be the FOURTH hard disk I've plopped in this beast. Even though it is a laptop, I very rarely take it anywhere. It just sits in my desk, plugged into A/C power. I don't understand why the disks should be so delicate. I've used nothing but IBM TravelStar 10GB disks, which have a very good reputation, but it makes you wonder.

I happen to have a spare 10GB on hand, since my wife recently filled the 10GB disk in HER laptop and I replaced it with a 30GB. I'm going to try to mirror my disk using Linux today and hope I can get most of the information from it. I've got all of my DATA burned to CD, but if I have to format and reinstall, the pain-in-the-butt factor will be very high.