The interface between technology and brute force

Last week my computer at home died. Having crashed, it then failed to boot up. Even with the start up floppy it was limping to the opening windows splash-screen, before getting stuck as it attempted to run scandisk. At this moment a horrible screeching sound would start to emanate from the case, and my heart would sink. Naturally working in new media I had made no regular back-ups....

On the plus side, working in new media meant there has been no end of helpful advice about why I should or shouldn't replace it with a Mac, why I should build my own replacement, why I shouldn't build my own replacement, and where I should go immediately to get the hard-drive recovered. However I am indebted to Evil Coffee for his solution, which I adapted to my own methodology. Last night, my inhibitions depleted by alcohol from the office party, I delivered a punch directly to what I considered to be the most likely location of the offending hard-drive.

That has had two results. Firstly I have sore knuckles today. Secondly, the machine now boots up again. It is clearly still very sick as the display is shonky, it doesn't know where to find the mouse (and have you ever tried using windows without a mouse?), and it occasionally just gives up. However, I have been able to rescue all the finished and unfinished music I feared I had lost forever :-)