tech‧nol‧o‧gy /tɛkˈnɒlədʒi/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronuncia[tek-nol-uh-jee]
–noun
1. magic.
2. basically anything really cool that you don’t know how it works…and if it breaks, you have to buy a new one.

…or so says Strong Bad. Pretty good definition, if you ask me.

Both of my hard drives, a combined 300GB or so worth of data, kicked the bucket this past weekend, mere hours apart. I had the foresight to back most of the data up about a month ago, and most of the recent stuff (mostly D&D documents), I can recreate. And hey, a fresh install of Windows never hurts. At the very least, it’s a welcome excuse to purge my PC of all the random dumb applications I’ve loaded up since my last clean install.

The thing that really bugs me, though, is the annoyance and the cost of buying new hardware. It seems like every hardware upgrade I spring for is born of frantic urgency as opposed to careful research and planning. I’d love to buy a new processor, or more RAM. But hey, I don’t need those things, right? Better to save a bit of money for them and then decide exactly what I want. No rush.

Not really the case lately. Here’s what my latest hardware purchases have looked like, off the top of my head:

- 80GB hard drive (replacement for dead 100GB hard drive)
- 500GB hard drive (replacement for dead 250GB hard drive)
- New case (replacement for godawful desktop case…okay, this was a bit of an indulgence)
- LCD monitor (replacement for dead LCD monitor)
- Wireless router (replacement for dead wireless router)
- 64MB AGP videocard (replacement for fried 128MB AGP videocard)
- 2.6GHz CPU (replacement for fried 2.4GHz CPU)
- 512MB RAM stick (replacement for fried 1GB RAM stick…still haven’t bought more)

And I’d have a motherboard on the list too, had my co-workers not been able to help me out with that particular piece of hardware at the time. My point is, PC hardware really seems to suck lately. Whatever happened to awesome hardware that lasts forever? I still have a 400MHz Pentium II out in the living room, with a Voodoo 3 videocard and four hot-ass SCSI drives stacked on top of each other, that still ran fine when I stopped using it. Yet none of the dead hardware listed above lasted for more than a year. I’ve probably purchased more emergency replacement parts in the past two years than I have actual I’m-buying-them-cause-I-just-want-to-upgrade parts in the past ten.

The 250GB drive (the dead-est of the two drives) isn’t more than maybe a year-and-a-half old…and yet, my usual salvage-the-hard-drive-for-a-few-final-moments tricks failed me. I used to use the old “freeze the hard drive” trick on bad drives to get them functioning long enough to back up critical documents (worked like a charm on my old Linux box), but the 250GB drive wasn’t having any of that. Stupid piece of junk.

On the bright side, at least I have a whopping 580GB of drive space now. Maybe these ones will last more than a freaking year. Now why the hell is my DVD-RW drive’s eject mechanism acting up? Grrrrrr…