still bummed...

it's the hard drive...wouldn't be too big of deal except my computer
did not come with "recovery disks". I don't know that they still do
it, but in the early days of XP, you were never going to need recovery
disks again, so manufacturers did not supply the disks and instead
hid a recovery routine and the basic load of software on the computer's
hard drive....which is now dead, on an otherwise decent computer,
512 Mbytes RAM, 19" monitor etc. all useless without a harddrive
and an operating system.

I've started the process of trying to get recovery disks from HP.
Its a long tedious process...the web page ends up sending you in
a loop, if you need recovery disks, you click on a customer service
link, its link for recovery disks sends you back to the page about
recovery disks, where you can click on a link that sends you to
customer service...and back....and forth. The "voice activated"
customer service phone line is not much better...I think at the
4th or 5th level I spoke to a human, unfortunately she wasn't in
this hemisphere, and English wasn't even her second language.
She seemed to know what to do though...forwarded my call to
a section that is only open "business hours", and the recording
was kind enough to tell me so before it cut the line. I'm now in
the midst of step 3 of this process, I tried to email tech support,
all I want is recovery disks...

In the meantime, Elesa was kind enough (or unfortunate enough)
to take a nap at one point this weekend, at which point I loaded
my scanner software on her laptop. It has been lots of fun :)

anyway, I'm posting one of my scans...in memory of the hard drive.