I have a love/hate relationship with my laptop.  Mostly hate this last week.  Last December I had to ship the thing off to Dell to get a big ol’ workover.  They fixed it all up (I’m only mildly appreciative; it was an expensive warranty and it should have been built better to begin with!).  Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough.  The hard drive completely died earlier this week.  Totally fried.  The computer wouldn’t even recognize its existence – kept giving me an error message saying there wasn’t one present.  Ug.

In defense of the laptop, the thing just wasn’t designed for the life of a youth pastors’ computer; over the last few years it’s been on several mission trips, close to ten retreats, half a dozen all nighters, and a ton of other abusive scenarios that somehow fit into my job description.

Anyway, the thing self destructed.  I picked up a replacement hard drive – by replacing it myself I could do it for about a fifth of what the repair place would charge the church, and installed it in the computer.  Thankfully, I was able to recover about 95% of my data off the damaged hard drive using an enclosure.  The only thing I really was going to lose was some email, but because I backed everything up in December, I only have the last few months missing and I can recover those easily enough with Gmail since I have everything go through my Gmail address.

So at the end of the day, I ended up with a bigger, faster hard drive, no data lost, but a couple days worth of time gone.  So a little bit of a win and a little bit of a loss.  And I kinda hate the computer more than usual right now.

And I’m super bummed that all my iTunes play counts are reset.