I am convinced that there is a Daemon outside of Seattle who listens for people who take Microsoft's name in vain.

I say this because, after a week where I cursed them a LOT while getting used to MS Outlook, I had one heck of a crash Friday night.

It was a windows crash where my first concern was to figure out if it was a motherboard or a hard drive failure. I finally figured out that, even though Windows would neither boot nor install, the motherboard's control panel looked pretty clean and I should try to swap in another hard drive. The old 10-gigger worked and I was even able to backup my data. I was about to order a replacement hard drive when I realized that the big Western Digital was still under warranty. I started to fill out the RMA and found a link to their diskette-based disk tester. When the hard drive passed the test, I knew that the problem was probably a software problem.

So, Saturday night I rewrote the drive with 0s, then spent Sunday re-installing and patching. I am still putting software back on the big grey box.

I even got an hour or so of work done on Sunday night.

That was a good crash.