Computer woes

Grr... stupid computer.

So, I come home on Tuesday to find my computer most displeased with me. I'd left it on during the day, and attempting to fire it back up to install my recently-purchased Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts. Instead I see a black boot-up screen that's stuck on the BIOS not being able to find a system file. Uh oh, that's not good.

I'd suspected something was up for a while now, as one of the laptop's hard drives had developed a mysterious periodic "click" that experience has taught me is symptomatic of an impending crash, but having it finally happen still kinda sucks. Anyway, I try to boot up, mess around with the BIOS, no dice. Diagnosis: total hard drive crash.

The computer in question is an Alienware Aurora m9700 laptop, a sexy sexy machine that can run pretty much anything at its highest settings. I got involved in other things Tuesday night (catching up on a little TV, and watching Knocked Up, freaking hilarious movie), and resolved to fix it yesterday. So yesterday after work I stopped at Best Buy on the way home and picked up a new 2.5" 80GB SATA Seagate hard drive, which turned out to be the exact model that was already installed in the laptop. It was probably unnecessary to pick up the new HD, as it was only the one drive that crashed and the computer had 2 drives installed in a RAID-0 setup, so by removing the RAID I could have just run with the one drive that was still good, but now I have two good drives and will probably run in a master-slave setup to allow for 160GB of storage.

In any case, after some playing around in the BIOS, and searching for my good screwdriver (doesn't finding things after having moved just suck?), I installed the drive and removed my RAID setup, installing Windows XP and my drivers. The laptop is back up on the Internet, now, and I've started going through the lengthy Windows Update process, as well as installing some of my old software. Apart from a few dozen Company of Heroes replays and shoutcasts, a couple of Civilization 4 saved games, a few thousand hands of poker tracker history, and some recent tweaks to my FFXI macros, I should make it out with nothing lost, as I didn't keep anything non-recreatable by itself on the laptop.

I've gotten pretty good at getting a system back up and running from scratch, I've gotta say, and I was never actually worried that the laptop wouldn't be operational in time for my trip to Minnesota this weekend, where we're going to hang out, drink, go out for good sushi, and likely play copious amounts of Halo 3.

Speaking of which, I bought Halo 3 this week, but haven't played it yet, largely because I wanted my "virgin" experience to be in co-op. I'm a good friend :)

Tonight, after work, is going to be getting everything installed and up and running, playing around with Opposing Fronts, and packing. Tomorrow I go straight from work to the airport, and don't fly back until Sunday night.