After months of tethering on the brink, my (laptop’s) harddrive managed to eat itself! It’s not like I didn’t see it coming, but it’s hard… it’s almost like losing a child (not that I’d know!), a very resourceful child at that.

So I called Dell US pretending I still lived there because Dell Canada was being a big baby about the whole thing; they outright refuse to help me unless I transfer service tags, which I can’t because their customer support works EST and is not 24/7. It turns out my warranty’s run out anyway so I had to buy a new harddrive. Dell quoted $499CND (excluding tax and shipping) for a 40GB HD! Incredible!

My laptop, (a Dell Inspiron 4100 runs on Windows ME) is 2 years old; I wasn’t going to spend almost $600 on it. Instead I spent Friday researching laptops; I found two good ones under $1500 (emergency laptop budget).

But then I started thinking about my ugly and clunky old laptop, I loved it, we’ve been through so much together, we’ve abused, used, and angered each other to points of frustration, yet it hasn’t let me down once throughout those two years. It’s been faithful and loyal and stayed with me longer than most. I couldn’t very well abandon it just because of a fried harddrive, can I? There’s a ~sententious~ saying among the Krio people of Sierra Leone that “bad bush no dae for troway bad pekin” loosely translated… ‘there’s no bad bush to dump bad children’…. I guess you have to be Krio to get it. It’s not right to dump my laptop just because of an easily replaceable harddrive!

I checked with local computer stores and got a 40GB HD for less than half of Dell’s price, my sister, whom I bugged to no end throughout this very trying time, got me the Windows XP upgrade. I spend my Friday night installing stuff, I must have called Dell like a gazillion times, and I’d like to announce right here and now that DELL’S CUST/TECH SUPPORT SUCKS! They just read my owners manual back to me! Some dude/dudette in Bangalore, India (yes, the country India, where Dell’s call center is) probably undertrained, underpaid, overworked, sleep deprived and can’t be bothered with actual support.

I did however hit jackpot, I got someone who understood my ‘problem’ just like I’d explained and walked me through the final installation process as I’d somehow managed to partition my harddrive and didn’t have enough memory to install anything. He was knowledgeable, knew what he was doing and took just about five minutes to walk me through and called me 20 minutes later to make sure everything worked out fine. I’d still be on the phone if I hadn’t gotten him.

~[m-w’s word of the day]~

PLAYING: Here without you – Three down doors

READING: Hey, Nostradamus! – Douglas Coupland

WATCHING: 7th Heaven

QUOTE: “I hear this life is overrated but I hope it gets better as we go”