After rebuilding my desktop computer in January 2008 to reestablish my geek-fu, I subsequently had a really bad run of luck with my CoolerMaster power supply and my Asus GeForce 8800GT video card. In August 2009, my 500Gb hard drive began to throw errors and I scampered out and bought a replacement just in time to get the data off it and not lose anything.

Over the weekend my super fast Western Digital 74Gb Raptor hard drive that Windows is installed on decided to give up the ghost. It passes the POST on boot up and attempts to load Windows but never succeeds and reboots on its own. I suppose I should be happy that I managed to get over two years out of that Western Digital hard drive, the Raptor series of hard drives spin much faster than a standard hard drive and provide superior performance but do tend to wear out sooner as a by product.

Now if only the cost of a solid state hard drive technology had come down far enough that I could afford it without feeling guilty, I’d never have to wait for something to load again!