Hey, all. I'm at the helm of my new computer. I got my dad to front me some money so I could pay for it upfront, and we'll take it out of my check over the next few weeks.

I bought the basic model at Gateway. It's honestly all I need. I don't do anything tremendously fancy on here; just some browsing, some emailing, some occasional AIMing, and viewing the races at Phoenix via the streaming webfeed if I don't feel like going to the track.

Anyhow, one of the main reasons I bought it at Gateway was, they offered to "slave" my hard drive over to the new one if I purchased a new system there. I figured that would be cool; the thing was completely shut down, and I couldn't get it back on to access what files I wanted to save. Besides, I never had any complaints about the operation of my previous system, so I purchased the 310S without a monitor (my old one is working fine, thank you $150 much) or printer (ditto). And let's hear it for me remembering to save my cable modem driver CD and the Cox High-Speed Connection CD. That saved me a couple weeks of downtime.

I'm getting ahead of myself, however. The guys in the service center took my list of what I wanted copied, and told me it'd be a few hours. After a while, I'd thought of a couple more things I wanted to save, so I gave them a call. The guy who answered said, "Oh, hey, Mr. Gray. I was just about to call you. We're all done." I asked him if they could still pull a few more things off of it for me, and he said, "Um, well, there's a problem."

Turns out my hard drive was DEAD dead. Or, as the receipt put it: "HD is clicking but not registering on BIOS. Slave of HD not possible."

SO, basically, I've spent most of the evening being pissed at myself. Doubly. Now, if I'd taken the old one in to get it fixed when I first started having problems last September or so, it would have been free. But I didn't get off my duff and find out when my warranty expired (as I mentioned previously, turns out I had a 3-year warranty, which expired just before this past Christmas). THEN, if I'd taken it in this year to buy a new one, like I was thinking about doing, SOMEtime before last Tuesday, they would have been able to pull my files off the old system, since it hadn't died yet.

I didn't have anything on there I can't live without; anything to do with the business, I do on my parents' computer at the office anyway. I had a few charts and such that I did here at home, but I had partial foresight in taking copies of those over to the office a few weeks ago when my computer got finicky about when it was going to print. Honestly, what I'm most upset about losing are my email address book, my Favorites folder (which I'm slowly replenishing as stuff comes to me), and my gargantuan spam filter list. Over the course of those 3 years, I'd accumulated a bucketful of phrases, words, and other things to watch for in spam that routed messages off into a separate folder I'd check once a week or so and delete the 176 messages in there. Coupled with my whitelist that saved messages from usual places like Top5 and stuff, it was a nearly flawless system (I'd get maybe one or two spams in my regular Inbox a week). Now I get to start from scratch.

Oh well. I was looking for a little excitement, something for a change of pace. Got my wish, I suppose.

It's a nice system. When I took the keyboard out, I noted it was smaller than my old one -- for starters, it lacks those stupid "Internet Dashboard" buttons all over the top of it. But for some reason, I'm flying over this thing. I don't know if it's the dimensions of it or what, if it's angled a little differently so as to promote aerodynamic movement of my fingers, but I'm typing like Tank at the controls of the Nebuchadnezzar.

Anyway, this has reshuffled my priorities a little bit. I'm going to have to put that new computer chair on hold and stick with my folding chair, back-paining as it may be. And another thing... if you're reading this, email me a message, so I can start to rebuild my Address Book. I'd appreciate it.

We're addressing my mad mood swings next week, too. Stay tuned for a week from today or so. Perhaps I'll post before then, perhaps not. Depends on how I'm feeling.