Last weekend, I walked into my home office to see the notebook PC that I use for work (a Dell Latitude D600) rebooting and reporting that it couldn’t find its primary hard disk. Not good news.

I tried freezing the disk (see also 200 ways to revive a hard drive) but to no avail. The drive just would not spin up.

Thankfully, I had a backup (although not as recent as it should have been), and I had supplied my current client with a CD with most of my recent work, with the remaining items still being retrievable from my e-mail (I frequently tell people not to use e-mail as a filing system, but I sure am glad that I still had all of those attachments there…). It seems that all I lost was the correct time/date stamp on some files and my meeting notes from Microsoft Office OneNote.

From talking to colleagues, this is not the first time this has happened – we have had at least three of these PCs suffer the same fate, on top of my nightmare experience getting the Bluetooth card replaced in the same machine earlier this year (which seems to be another common fault). I do understand my IT Manager when he tells me why we buy Dell (good specification at reduced price relative to HP, IBM, Toshiba, etc.), but if we also take into account my lost time, then maybe the overall cost is more expensive that it first appears.