What’s awesome?
Getting a new computer.
What’s not so awesome?
Suffering a hard drive failure after less than a week.
At least Vista alerted me to the disk error and got me to back up the files I had changed or moved since shifting everything over, so I didn’t lose any data. And I don’t have to ship anything anywhere; a technician’s supposed to be coming by within the week to install the new hard drive.
But GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.
Honestly, it’s a good thing that most hard drive failures happen early on. Better for it to happen now, when the amount of backup necessary is minimal, and the risk of loss isn’t very high, than for it to be a year from now. But it’s annoying, especially after all the work put into installing and configuring software.
It’s the classic “bath-tub” curve – failure rates high in the early period, then reducing to a low level, and starting to climb towards the end of the item’s working life.
I once had a hard disk fail the day after I’d installed it and loaded all the software and data… and reformatted the old disk. Since when I keep at least three copies of everything!
Yikes. Yeah, I’d wait a while before dumping the old data.
In this case, I hadn’t even quite finished scraping everything off my desktop and the laptop I was using in the interim, so I had about two backups even before I made an emergency one.
just out of curiosity, what brand of computer did this happen with?
(yeah, I know, all models have occasional glitches, but like to keep track of who seems to have more & more serious glitches)
Dell.
Who — props to them — told me I’d have a technician coming by to help in “three to five business days,” but the guy just called me half an hour ago to ask if he could come by, oh, now-ish. So I’m looking at about a 24-hour turnaround from when I notified them of the problem.
Sometimes customer service really does exist.
