This past week, my laptop hard drive failed — or, rather, started to fail — after a “small” drop. Thank goodness for the S.M.A.R.T. system that warned me. I contacted the insurance company (USAA is the greatest!) and they authorized repairs in my own shop, which saved money and allowed me greater control over the repairs. In the process, I was able to double the size of the hard drive. I also purchased an external 80 GB USB drive to move data from the old drive before it failed and later transfer it to the new one.

The downside of changing out drives is needing to reinstall programs. On the other hand, you start to realize that you didn’t really need all the old ones.

One I like, though, is AdSubtract Pro. I’ve been running 2.55 and decided this would be a good time to upgrade to 3.0. After all, so far, it’s been an absolutely terrific program.

Thank goodness I decided to find out what other users were saying before I purchased the “upgrade”, which is really apparently a major downgrade.

Guess I’ll stick with the old one, if I can find the install…. Otherwise, does anyone else have a better recommendation?