Blogging will be slow over the next several days, since the hard disk in my HP laptop decided to crash.
This is the second time my year-old computer decided to go down, taking all my data with it. Fortunately, I have backups of most of my stuff, but the most recent stuff - such as the newest novel outline, photos from Vancouver, etc. - are history.
Granted, it would be easy to pop in a new hard drive and re-install Windows, but I am in no mood to do so, given that HP's disk restore utility was unable to copy itself to a backup DVD, and therefore absolutely useless. (There also were several other useless utilities, such as an automatic update program that never worked.) This isn't even the first time an HP product has let me down, either; I've gone through a few horrible HP printers and a desktop.
Even if and when I get around to a new hard drive, I have lost so much trust in this system that I will only use it as a spare for checking emails.
Even worse was that the hard disk decided to crash while I was posting to another blog about the Moonies' destruction of American democracy. It is as if HP is Moonie-owned or something, the way the system crashed on me at precisely that moment.
For now, I am on an obsolete Dell laptop without wireless capability. It's on its last legs as well, acting funny at times. Looks like I will have to shell out a small fortune for another new computer - and this time around, I am ordering an Apple Macintosh (iMac to be specific). Macs these days are so compatible with PCs (complete with Intel processors) that the transition should not be too difficult at all.
