I guess the reasons behind buying a tablet just continue to mount. No seriously, there are some interesting points within this article.

My 3 year old Acer TravelMate 100 TabletPC hard disk (20G) was dying. It has served me well as a portable machine. I love the tablet features and the small size. It was one of the original prototype tablets that I started using about 6 months before TabletPCs were available publicly. Recently, the disk was periodically resetting itself, possibly due to sector failures. I tried using chkdsk /f to map out failed sectors (I’m not sure if it can deal with hard sector failure), but it didn’t seem to help much.

About 23 years ago I wrote a program that would read the File Allocation Table (FAT) of a floppy or hard disk. It could read the directory structures and display the fragmentation. I think it was dBase III that had a copy protection scheme that would record on which sectors it was installed and only work if it lived on those sectors. I didn’t like this scheme because it didn’t allow me to defragment my disk, so I used my program to help get around it. [Read the rest]