OK, the laptop didn’t exactly go pop, but it might as well have. With no advanced warning (when do you ever get warning?), my relatively new HP Pavilion zt3380 started blue-screening right at Windows Login. I got into recovery console mode, ran chkdsk, and it crapped out at 59% with an unrecoverable disk error. It sure seemed like a hard drive failure to me.

I didn’t relish having to pack it up and send it off for depot repair. So, I punted, booted off an XP Pro CD, deleted, and re-created the partition. So far, it’s reloading with no problems. So now the question is do I pull an all-nighter to get everything loaded back on or do I use my clunker emergency laptop, which I’ve quickly updated and loaded key files on? If XP setup goes good, perhaps I won’t need to bother sending it out for repair.

Data loss was never an issue. I am nothing if not religious about file backup. Granted, I didn’t image the drive, so restoring everything will be time consuming. I am going to look at Ghost, or something similar, because losing time is a real killer for me. I have a big client meeting tomorrow, and I’d rather not bring the beater laptop into the board room.

I did my 15-minute segment on WirelessTechRadio this morning. It was a blast. Jim Sutton runs a tight ship, and the production quality was excellent - highly professional! I’m waiting for the archive so I can listen to myself, which is funny because I hate the sound of my own voice. They cover a lot of wireless ground, covering consumer Wi-Fi (shameless plug) to fixed wireless broadband and everything in between.

I’ll keep you posted on my laptop saga; I’m sure many of you can relate.