Yesterday, my laptop made a sound like… well, like ball bearings clicking into each other. This is never good. But it appeared to be coming from the CD drive, so I didn’t worry about it.
If this happens to you… worry about it. My computer simply refused to boot this afternoon, and as I was flipping it over to try to find the stupid hard drive flap, it started booting. Slowly. With a click-click-click.
This time, I swear I didn’t do anything. And that part is still under warranty, so Dell is sending me a new one. But still, it kind of sucks.
Katie’s old laptop (a Mac G3) finally kicked it in a case of accidential death (a friend knocked it off the table and the montor died). She’s now sporting a brand-new Dell Latitude, which she’s digging.
update: Dell sent me a refurbished drive, and I used Ghost to reimage it. fortunately, my old drive would still work when tipped sideways or left upside down, so that made my backup efforts easier to manage. (windows XP has a backup thingy called “ASR” which doesn’t work. at all.)