2006 Ended with a Double Crash

The end of the year was 'celebrated' by me being very frustrated. First Crash - My US Postal Inspection Service laptop will no longer power-up. Absolutely no power at all. AAARRGH! Second Crash - My Hewlett Packard laptop somehow received a lobotomy. Last Friday I logged into HP through the VPN to log my billable hours and was forced to download and install updates. After more than a hour it prompted me to reboot. Now my laptop boots and loads XP but that's about it. I can select a program and it may or may not load. If it does load it takes about 20-30 minutes! That's about the average for every single click (left or right)! Sometimes when it boots it indicates that the hard drive should be checked. It makes it to 10% then I think it forgets about what it was supposed to be doing. I think it has a really bad issue with focusing on the task-at-hand. Maybe my computer has ADD. And the only symptom I am seeing is the lack of completion of MY tasks. Maybe it has 400 other projects that it is working on - all at once of course. None of which are really getting enough dedicated time to complete. The thing that sucks is that all of my HP contacts are of course on this computer. I am struggling to open my Outlook in order to find my bosses phone number. No, I don't know her phone number. I have not even talked to her since last Feburary at my Performance Review. It has now been almost 3 hours - the phonebook opening is next! Then I will have to search for her name then open the properties to see the phone number. After lunch I may be able to make a phone call and start the process of fixing this piece of crap. I will probably end up driving over to Greenbelt, MD to the office in order to be able to connect to the network and begin the process of re-building. I have not been to the office since my last round of hiring interviews almost 3 1/2 years ago. Luckily, I have a full back-up of this laptop (as of 12/26/06) so when I have to NUKE this bad boy there will not be too many tears! So, for now, I am trying to get things accomplished on a borrowed laptop. I guess my new year is not starting out on a very good foot (computer-wise). Hopefully this will all be a fading memory in a day or two. AAARRRGGGHHH!!!!