Last night I fell asleep with Phoenix building on my laptop which sits on a small stool about 4 feet from my bed. I remember thinking as I drifted off to sleep about the curious grinding noise coming from the disk as the build progressed.
When I woke up this morning the machine was powered down. For a moment I thought maybe the power in the house had gone out and the laptop battery had gone down. "This sucks, I'll probably have to restart that build," I though. Then I noticed the green led battery indicator and started to think something might be wrong.
When I went to power up the machine it wouldn't get past the intial bios without failing to find some necessary file and I knew my disk was toast.
The laptop is a Dell Latitude PIV 1.6GHz with 512MB RAM. It's approximately 2 months old. The disk is dead and along with it all my data :(
Today I got a "loaner" laptop from the PC support folks. It's a blazing fast PII 400 with 128MB RAM. It took them about 7 hours from the time I called till I had the loaner in hand and I've spent the last 2 hours getting it set up to be able to build (and all the other stuff I need to get work done). I can't even communicate how much it sucks to set up a build environment on Windows. I really can't wait for linux to get good enough that I'll want to use it as my primary OS. It's a real pain having such a great build system and such a crappy desktop on linux and having such a crappy build system and a great desktop on windows.
