So imagine my annoyance at being greeted this morning with a SMART warning that errors had been found on my hard drive. The machine is a Dell Optiplex and it's 2 yrs old. Nothing worth saving on it so I wasn't having fits but still...
I did actually reinstall the operating system in hopes that the registry error was all there was to it. And that worked - for about 10 minutes, when the blue screen of death I had previously seen was replaced with a black screen of oblivion stating "Hard Drive Failure at Sector 0".
Grrrr. Majorly annoying. But thankfully, oh dear god thankfully - just a testing maching with nothing critical on it. And also thankfully - it's still under warranty. A quick call to Dell service and a replacement HD is on it's way, but I'll just have to waste spend a day installing the drive and reinstalling the software (plus the many, many stupid windows updates).

You know it's worth however long it takes to do it - don't just think about it - backup your files!