Just before a trip I figured out that my new laptop hard drive was failing. I received the replacement drive less than 12 hours before I was to leave for the airport. Now I have to reinstall everything on the road. I have all of my documents on another drive to copy back, but it is still a pain. Fortunately I haven’t had it long. The worst part is that I would rather have this joined to the Windows domain back in the office and I can’t really do that easily away from the office (especially when the VPN client won’t run on the reinstall of Windows.) I likely just need to download and reinstall, I just can’t download easily at the moment. At least I know now that over the past few weeks my performance annoyances with Windows Vista was not Vista’s fault. It was a failing drive.