Breaking news today, Ed's indestructible laptop has been repaired and no longer fails to ignore any and every hard drive attached to it. Am I impressed with the help out there? Reactions were varied on my travels to a solution.

Apple Can't say too much as I didn't dare call them, being out of warranty and all!

Geniuses on the Apple forum say it is just one of those things. "Dude, like what do you expect with a 4 and a half year old computer that never broke down before?" They had no answer to the dilemma of having a back-up that I couldn't access it. They blamed my back-up copies. My bad for making a cheap clone.

Geniuses at Carbon Copy Cloner proved beyond all doubt that their clone was perfect and my computer was inexplicably shafted in every respect. Kudos CCC.

Apple geniuses with no affiliation to the company say that a hard drive failure is certainly one of those things to expect when your favorite company uses a $30 Made in Hong Kong hard drive in a $2000 machine.

A Microsoft spokesman magnanimously says, "If all you namby pamby Apple fanbois adopted the approach of the finest brains at Redmond, you would photocopy everything and keep your data in a neat pile securely taped together with hope and chewing gum."

Data Rescue proved beyond all doubt that they are the guys to call, if you ever need to retrieve all your files from a hard drive that appears to be as dead as a dodo. $100 for a sexy data recovery bootable disk. Thank you, thank you.

Mrs Ed, Dell floozy and technophobe says, "If things come in threes, we are in deep do-do, because your hard drive failed 10 days ago, my hard drive failed 2 days ago, what's next?"

Ed says, as optimistically cynical as ever. "Steve Jobs is god and will look over me in my moment of need and give me the strength to bail myself out.

In view of the outcome of her girlie, please help me Mr Nice tech man phone call, what I should have said was, "Your god, Mr Dell, will look over his shoulder at you and glibly send you a new hard drive, motherboard or screen, or whatever it is you need. And he is such a loser you will get it for free, overnight, even though your laptop is 2 years out of warranty."

New hard drive: excellent upgrade for a laptop.

Whatever the injustices or faults with a dead hard drive, let's just say that a brand spanky new replacement is a great (and cheap) and easy DIY way to breathe life into a laptop.

In the technically wondrous scheme of things, I think hard drives are more impressive than any giga hertzoid processor or RAM. Up to 160GB of storage crammed into a tiny 2.5inch case that can withstand 900 g's. Just wow and not even a fat pisstaker could crush that sucker. In line with my prowess in the bedroom, I went for smaller but faster with a new Seagate 80GB hard drive spinning at an insane 7200RPM.

Installation was simple, (and believe me I am king klutz with the fiddly things in life) and now my Powerbook runs both quieter, cooler and did I say INSANELY much faster than the $30 excuse for a hard drive originally installed. And it carries a 5 year warranty, which isn't too shabby compared to the sad support offered by Apple, a $60bn fruit company renowned for quality and attention to detail.

What is next?

On with the show, I guess. And when I can think of a way to explain how to back-up all files in triplicate both on land and on the internet, I will do so with gusto and aplomb and plenty of speeeeeeed.