John,
>Was the notebook that lost its hard drive a Dell?
No, but it was a business notebook [ to differentiate from "mass market" laptops with high performance CPU but some other blunder somewhere, selling throgh nation wide campaigns] with a fuji drive. There were some other reports about fuji drives used from that area in time. This laptop had a Mobile CPU and the fan setup from desktop CPU [and a slightly better than normal name for good thermal design].

>If so, turns out Dell had a severe overheating problem that was cured by downloading a 3rd party utility called i8kfan that sometines made my Inspiron sound like a Jumbo taking off. But it kept it cool!

Well, after 3 minutes of full CPU load the fan was clearly audible...
If the machine had to work for a few hours, it was usually working in another room [or the bathroom of the hotel at night, if I was working at customer site <g>]. The machine was "warm", not enough to bake eggs on but more than body temperature. And this is the temperature area where the lifetime can get shortened - exponentially, and you sometimes only need small overheated areas. And the machine was running full blast for hours, sometimes even during the work day with loong cables far away from me with processing priority scaled down for the long time task. During development I usually got more than 90% processing power day without the machines reaction time slowing down. It WAS a nice machine - but...

So my usual setup today is a good "consumer laptop" with graphic card able to work on external monitor as well, large disk and much memory, or just a large USB disk, if given a good enough machine on site. Get a new one often, get them not too expensive.

The best "hardworking machine" is in a rather small case (2 HD, 1 DVD Burner) easy enough to carry if I need more processing power - and I won't sweat too much for "business clothes" even if I have to walk through large company buildings <g>. No SCSI, no streamer, just USB/Firewire/LAN connectivity.

This one gets upgraded with best HW repeatedly, the old "best HW" going to the then weakest machine. [Keyboard and mice I leave at the customer site if possible, since I am addicted to the mouseman mouse and I bought a lot just to be able to drop one at every site I work - either for laptop, small case or given machine].

Not an ideal situation, but I know each machine with it's components, even if I have to get on my knees once or twice a year. Having images for easy installs helps a lot. Works for me at least <bg>.

have fun

thomas