I'm pissed, but that pales in contrast to how livid I was last night.

Rewind a week ago: My computer had just finished its latest weekly virus/spyware scan and defragmentation (keeps things fresh and speedy), when my backup/media hard drive failed. The ironic thing is that this particular hard dive contained my backups and my paging file (which is pretty essential to Windows).

Once I received my replacement drive (I love Western Digital for their warranty policies), I decided that I might as well reinstall Windows, as it has been almost a year since I have done so (again, this keeps things fresh and speedy). So I reinstall WinXP Home, neccessitating a call to New Dehli to get my activation confirmation code, spend a few days replacing my lost recent backup material with older backup material found on DVDs, and then a few more days tweaking the innards to get WinXP more secure and customized.

Fast forward to last night: I've spent a good day ripping my gargantuan amount of media (movies and music) to my NEW backup/media hard drive, when my CD-drive stops reading disks. Yikes. "I'll deal with it later," I thought; I have another optical drive I can use. Granted, this second optical drive hasn't been working too well lately either, but it'll do. Ten minutes later, it dies too.

Differential Diagnosis: either my IDE driver has pooped, or both of my optical drives have gone belly-up. After some troubleshooting, it turns out that both of my optical drives died in one night. It also turns out that both of these drives are made by Lite-On. Never again.