onefixedstar | Technical woes

I think the hard drive on my laptop may be faltering. Lately, it's been making more noise than it should be. It's not clicking yet--just buzzing--but I suspect it won't be long, so I've been assiduously backing up my data. Annoying, but this is what extended warranties and 250GB external hard drives are for. And on the bright side, a hard drive failure will force me to take the laptop down and get the failing graphics card replaced (no more random red dots!), and perhaps get them to repair the sensors that tell the computer whether the lid is open or shut, so that I don't keep putting it my tiny padded backpack slot while it's still running (and very hot). Not to mention forcing me to reinstall Windows, which might solve my other current problem of extreme slowness. (I know computers seem to slow down over time, but 20 seconds to open the start menu is ridiculous. It doesn't always take that long, but it happens often enough to be irritating. I've run AdAware and Spybot and Norton Anti-Virus, and none of them came up with anything. I've also used a registry repair tool which claims to eliminate dangerous and system-slowing entries, but it hasn't made a noticeable difference.) Alternately, the slowness may be a consequence of my failing hard drive, in which case it will still be fixed. Ooh, and a complete system reinstall would also get rid of that annoying mystery software that turns random online images into ad brackets using a very crude algorithm. So it all works out. Or it will once my system goes black.