Yep - I have been living in an absolute hardware nightmare for the past several days.  Here is a blow by blow for those that like to laugh at people in pain...

1.  Friday morning last week, I click the power button on my laptop to bring it out of stand by.  It had been acting a bit weird on Thursday in Vegas before I flew out from the DevConnections conference, but little did I know what it had in store for me.  I am prompted to log on, I enter my creds, and then nothing but a black screen.  Hmmmmm... a cold reboot and I am again prompted by nothing but a black screen and a whirring hard drive.  I can tell at least part of the Vista boot sequence is happening because the screen is a "painted black" instead of a "dead screen black". 

2.  I connect up to the corp lan, do a LAN boot and bring up the Vista Recovery tools.  It then spends over an hour doing a check disk and reports all kinds of stuff having been fixed.  Now that is not a good sign.  Point of reference to the Vista team - when you are doing a Recovery and start a check disk, it would be really nice to seem some kind of progress indicator instead of a message saying it will take over an hour (1.5 to be exact).  All the while, I am forced to present upstairs to a group of developers on WCF without a laptop.   Why no laptop?

3.  Welllll, this is where it really gets fun.  After my main machine goes belly up, I turn to my spare.  Interesting enough, it has suddenly developed the bad habit of running for at most five minutes at a time before simply turning off. WTF?  That thing is now toast as well.

4.  I finish my presentation, call in my busted primary to tech support (which I have no determined is for sure a bad hard drive since when I tried to do a repave with an image off the corporate network the hard drive started to sound like a box of broken glass).  "That's too bad," they say.  "We will rush you a replacement drive and you will have it first thing Monday morning!"  Good thing, because I am now on an old, old machine that I have had to repave with an XP image.  That isn't bad, but this machine has developed an annoying habit of also turning off.  But instead of every five minutes like my secondary machine, it does it any time you do anything that requires intensive use of the video system.  Considering I need to be capturing video from the MS Roundtable device, this is not a good thing!  Let's not even talk about the fact that the XP image is missing about every important driver I need (wireless drivers anyone?) and it is a nightmare getting it all patched, updated, etc. to only find out it can't handle video stress!  Good God.

5.  Soooooooo, I borrow an older machine from a friend.  She hasn't used the machine in ages, no longer knows the admin password, and the machine's domain account has expired so it can't get on the corporate network.  Ok, repave that one with the Vista image.  Sets up nicely EXCEPT that I get an error message from the Network Access Protection pilot software that my machine is violating security policy by not having anti-virus installed.  Why the f*** is anti-virus not installed as part of the corporate install I wonder?  Hmmmmm, no worries, I will just install it myself and get in compliance.  Well now, it seems the NAP software has determined I am such a security  risk to the network, it has limited my access to the corporate network.  Limited so effectively I cannot install the anti-virus software I need to be in compliance. Basically, that machine is now worthless as well and I have to leave early the next morning (today) to go to Dallas.

6.  What about that replacement drive that was supposed to have shown up yesterday you ask?  Well, it seems that someone forgot to enter my laptop into the warranty system, and the drive could not be sent until that was fixed.  When did that happen?  Monday morning.  So as my laptop sat sans hard drive on Monday, the clerical monkeys where fixing the warranty error instead of sending my my hard drive.  So it gets sent out late on Monday, to show up in Minneapolis today while I am flying down to Austin, TX. GRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!

7.  I lugged my old XP enabled machine that can get on the network but likes to turn off when I do video stuff so at least I can do some work and my old machine that is w/o a drive.  Steve Loethen, the Senator, has graciously brought an extra SATA drive for my laptop.  Steve is kind of like the mafia member of our team - lots of black market stuff that you wonder how he gets but are afraid to ask.  Hopefully, I will be able to get that drive installed and repaved from the network tomorrow without any issues (Har har har) and I will be back in the modern world.  Mike Benkovich brought me an USB enclosure so I can plug in my old drive to see if I can recover anything from it (fingers crossed that my VS 2008 WCF Hands-On Lab that I finished last week is recoverable!!!!).  Good to have team mates like these guys!