kudos to HP and Microsoft

This is a picture of me losing my mind the other night, comforting myself by having some whipped cream out of the can, as I battled with my computer. Note cocktail and ashtray full of butts as well. The hard drive on my laptop was doing something very obscure (Primary IDE channel on Device 0 was switching by itself from DMA to PIO transfer mode).

I finally broke down and went to seek professional help (for the laptop problem). It turns out to be an XP bug related to the machine going to sleep repeatedly (I never actually turn it off, I put it to sleep). I found a patch on the Microsoft website after only about 5 minutes (which seemed long), and got really good customer support from HP, the makers of my laptop, through their email-based support. So, kudos to them.