Posting from my new laptop!

It's an HP Pavilion dv9000. It was a discontinued line at Best Buy, so I got the display model and had the good ol' Geek Squad Russian Guy wipe it clean for me. So far, I like Vista quite a bit more than I was expecting.

Here's some specs:

- AMD Turion 64 x2 (1.6ghz)
- 17" screen, which on an HP means the keyboard has a numpad, which is a big seller for me. I love numpads and use them possibly too much.
- Gig of ram. That's more than I've ever had!
- nVidia graphics chipset whose exact number I'm not going to be arsed to find out. Good news: it's not the standard Intel graphics that a lot of laptops come with these days. It's not top-of-the-line, but then, I didn't want to spend more than $1,000 on a laptop at this point in my life. It'll run WoW, which is my main benchmark for graphics these days.
- 160g of hard disk space. Not huge but twice the size of my desktop. (And I might take out my hard-drive on my desktop, mount it as an external, and sell off my tower to defray the cost of my new baby.)
- DVD-CD RW drive with Lightscribe. Boner.

Excuse me while I install WoW.

So my hard drive is dying. Or at least it's not running up to snuff.

When I went to sleep, Norton was doing a weekly scan. When I woke up, my computer was hung in mid-boot with an error message. So I rebooted, and it wouldn't recognize I had a hard drive. Then I swore a bunch, then I rebooted again, and noticed my hard drive was making a "ping!" sound when it was singing. Not good.

So then I rebooted again, into safe mode, and it took forever, but it worked. After two tries.

So then I tried a normal boot, and it took a bit longer than usual, but I am up and running with no problems. Eventually sometime today I'm going to reboot and do a full hard disk scan, because errors are pointing to bad sectors.

But I'm also fairly certain that my hard drive is failing mechanically, and it's only a matter of time.

So as soon as possible, probably after Christmas, I'm going to have to buy a new hard drive, and start at least moving my critical files/OS to that.

Dumb mechanical stuffs.