I'm in the Market for a Hard Drive...

...like the one pictured above. I'm in need of a 40-60 gig HD for my Dell Latitude D600 to replace the one that crashed.

I mailed my laptop to my computer repair guy three weeks ago yesterday. He decided to choose that same exact moment to have a nervous breakdown and disappear for a week, leaving his employees (and me, since they couldn't find my Dell) in a state of subdued panic. Finally, 16 days after I mailed it off, I got a call from him on Saturday guaranteeing me the computer was fixed and that it would cost $80.

"Did you load Microsoft Office 7 like the last time?" I asked him. I was assured he had.

48 hours later, I drove to his shop (22 miles one way) and found the doors locked in the middle of the day. The one guy on duty had no idea where my laptop was, no idea where his boss was and no idea when he'd be back. When I had to find my own computer, he looked into the HD and discovered none of the device drivers I needed for the software were installed, and, surprise, surprise, Microsoft Office still hadn't been installed. In the meantime, the doors had been locked in our faces yet again and I had to call this boob to tell him his shop was closed in the middle of the day.

All told, the downloads took a couple of hours, I had to pay money for unvalidated parking and buy a lunch for Mrs. JP and me while my "all set" computer was being finished. Oh, and my 60 gig hard drive was replaced by a 20 gig (when I bought the laptop two years ago, it came with a standard 40 gig HD).

This is where is gets good:

Literally two hours after we get home, I'm downloading the software I needed to get the laptop back to where I had it, the OS began crashing. After the 3rd operating system crash, I texted him asking, "WTF did you put in my Dell? The OS has crashed 3 times. What are you going to do about this?"

The next day, he texted me back promising to put in a HD "like the last time" and I specified that I wanted another 60 gig like the one he'd removed with all the drivers and software pre-installed so I didn't have to wait like the last time.

Last night, I got two nasty text messages telling me to get "my machines out of here" (he's doing work on our Compaq, God help us) and that I'm "rude" and "unreasonably demanding" for expecting a 60 gig HD like the one he'd replaced instead of the piece of shit 20 gig HD that didn't work. He offered a full refund of my $80 but that still leaves me without a computer of my own. Bottom line: I waited 2 1/2 weeks so I could use my own laptop for 2 1/2 hours. The current HD is a glorified coaster.

So, this is the other drama with which Mrs. JP and I have had to contend since Monday and we didn't expect this. So why did we use him since he's a dishonest, incompetent boob and is so far away? The last time I did this, the guy had my laptop ready 24 hours after I'd mailed it off and the job was done right. The first night we met him a year and a half ago, he'd had someone drive him in a blizzard to our house and he was rocking three laptops at once to get our computers online. He used to be Houdini but since he'd put out his shingle he's lost his edge and now he's literally popping Tums like beer nuts.

We have to drive down there again today to get the Compaq back but I don't fancy having to share a computer with Mrs. JP like we had to for the last three weeks. So if any of you guys have a spare Dell Latitude D600 HD with even just a browser and OS, email me for my street address and we can talk money. I can format it myself with my Dell boot disk.