The hard drive on our year-old Dell died miserably on Monday. Tonight at nine PM a tech came out and replaced it (he was supposed to be here between 1:45 and 4:45 - don't ask). It took me way longer than it should have to realize that the reason the system wasn't recognizing the PCI wireless adapter was because there was an unknown device in Device Manager that needed to be configured, but eventually I got it and now we're back on the Net.

Tomorrow: reinstall printer, wireless mouse, CD writer software, and backed-up data. Oh, this is so much fun. And sometime within the next ten business days, try to re-connect the bad drive as a slave device to see if anything can be recovered from it prior to shipping it back to Dell (we get charged for the new disk otherwise, according to the tech; I guess "under warranty" only goes so far).

Did I mention it's my birthday on Saturday? I'd gripe about what a rotten present this is except I'm so happy to have a live Internet connection again that I can't bring myself to be too grumpy. Yes, I'm that pathetic.