My computer is punishing me

The date is actually marked in my calendar. The blog that I wrote about it is here.

On January 20th, 2009, my hard drive gave up the ghost. Max went to Best Buy and purchased a new 500 gb drive for me. He installed it and I began the long and drawn out process of reinstalling software and personalizing every aspect of my computer. I don't know that I had completed the process to my satisfaction yet.

It doesn't matter anymore. Because tonight before I left the house for a meeting, things began going wonky on me. Max and I were chatting and I saw that MS Outlook was taking a long time to start. I realized that it was locked up, but no big deal ... it would either sort itself out, or I would just go to the Task Manager, end the program, restart the computer and things would be fine. Right? Ummm ... no.

I went to the Task Manager. It wouldn't come up. Now, that is just plain freaky. It always comes up - no matter what! I tried again. Nothing.

"Max, I'm going to do a hard restart on this - got a problem with that?" He shook his head and looked a little concerned. I pressed the button. The screen came up and then went black, with a little dialog telling me that the hard drive couldn't read or write.

"Grrrrr." It also said I could press ctrl-alt-delete to retry. I did. Same screen. More growling.

Max turned the machine all the way off and we let it sit. Things came back to life.

Ok. We'll be fine. I will export my Outlook file for backup and start dragging things to the Drobo (main backup). I had to leave, but it seemed as if the files were taking an awfully long time to copy to the Drobo. This doesn't look good.

I got back from the meeting and the computer informed me that it would take 16 hours to copy these files to the Drobo. Ummm ... what? That's not right. I cancelled the copy, restarted the computer.

More black screen with nasty dialog. We powered down and it came back to life ... but, oh my was there incredible lag. For every 15 seconds of activity, there was 3 minutes of no response.

"Max, just go to Amazon and order another drive. I can wait until it gets here on Friday."

I was kind of chuckling. He didn't think that was appropriate behavior on my part. It ticked him off! There is no reason that these things keep happening to me. But. They do. I still chuckled. He still didn't think that was appropriate. He is not looking forward to reinstalling Windows. But, hey! I have to install every single other program on this thing and I have to find all of the areas that I personalize and I'm the one stuck on an itty, bitty laptop for the next two days. Hello!!! Feel sorry for me.

He doesn't. Well, maybe a little bit.

Me? I'm feeling very sorry for me.