I have been thinking about purchasing a new laptop for some time. My IBM laptop is big and clunky, and it has enough junk running on it that it's not really enjoyable to use more than I have to. I wanted something that I could take on vacations and use around the house in front of the TV. Ultimately, I decided to buy a Dell Mini 9. It's one of those newfangled netbooks; it's incredibly small, and also very cheap. It's no speed demon, but it fit what I wanted perfectly. It has a 64GB solid-state drive, and absolutely no moving parts. It's completely silent. The processor is an Intel Atom, and I bumped it up to 2GB of memory. It even runs Windows Vista, and it does so quite well. My only real complaint is that the battery lasts only a hair under four hours, but considering that it only has a four-cell battery, I'm willing to be forgiving. Considering that it cost me just over $500, I'm pretty pleased with it.
In addition to the laptop, I recently had to buy another hard drive for one of my servers. The box runs on a RAID-5, so theoretically I just needed to pop the new drive in and rebuild the array, right? Well, when the drive failed, the computer must have fun chkdsk or something and messed up the data on the two remaining drives, because when I rebooted it, I got a bluescreen, even in safe mode. So, I had to reinstall the operating system, and I also had to recover all of the data on the box. I have a remote backup at my parents' house, but I can only get around 120KB/second from that box to mine. Luckily, I had about two thirds of the data backed up locally as well, but I still have had to download about 80GB from the remote backup. The process has been slow and painful, but it's nearly finished.