Oh, I am still entirely willing to entertain the possibility of mucking out filthy old drains for the good of national culture – and probably even more so, when I go fulltime freelance and have complete control over my time (or as complete as possible, anyway). So yes, the dark side will always have a sumpy corner of my soul…

It’s a Dell? Well, from my wide experience of working with IT I suggest this: drop it in the Thames.

No, no, actually they’re like Peterborough – they have a dreadful reputation only partly earned. However, the 3 month old hard drive issue is simple: you’ve been using it for something important. It’s like this:

Gates’s Law:

Probability of hardware failure is proportional to the importance of the data store upon it.

This is why hard-drives filled to the brim with ripped YouTube videos, amusing PDF’d web-comics and pre-1995 PC games that won’t work on any version of Windows after 3.1 will endure *forever*.

What you need to do is find lots of useless downloadable crap on the Internet, a few hundreds MBs of it, and go through your hard drive, placing files in various important folders. In IT this is known as Trivializing your FAT (File Allocation Table). Once the data is below a certain level of average usefulness, the hardware it is stored on will become more reliable, and even repair itself in extreme cases.

Thanks for the congrats. (But now I have to get busy and fill that profile page up).