Coping With An Unexpected Laptop Outage

To make a very long story short, my conversations with Dell have left me with my same old laptop, but a new hard drive. The result, I started off this first real work day of the year with a laptop with no software on it.

This wasn't good. Here's what made it less painful...

• Having documents, calendar and my e-mail all in Google Apps means that the crash didn't effect any of these. I simply pointed the web browser to the right URL, and I was instantly back in business. Sure, the Spreadsheet and Docs tools are somewhat crude, but they really pay dividends in situations like this.
• The above is also true for my TODO list and customer notes, which I store on a secure wiki. Again, having this information online means it's accessible from any device, including a freshly installed version of Windows.
• Having a list of software tools I use made it a little easier to grab the key ones I needed. It also contains some specific URLs to somewhat hard to find utilities like sitecopy and GNU screen.
• The issue I ran in to, we believe, was a hard drive that has some issues. Luckily, the drive is still usable enough so I can mount it. I purchased a BlacX hot swapping SATA docking station. This is a fancy way of saying I bought a device I can literally (gently) drop my hard drive into and see it from my built compute r. It's awesome. It's well worth the $60.00, to be able to easily see and copy files from my old computer as I need them.
• Finally, Low Fat Moose Tracks and Reddi Wip definitely played a critical role in keeping me sane during this process. When in doubt, have another bowl of ice cream.

So far, the new system is coming together relatively well. I may even get some real work done today. Wouldn't that be nice?