I am become Death, the Destroyer of Laptops

Whenever I walk into IT, they eye me warily, wondering what I've managed to blow up this time.

Yesterday, I set a new record: It was only three weeks after IT gave me a brand-new laptop (wicked cool system, too: 2.0GHz, 2G of RAM, 100G hard drive) that the thing died - some file or the registry or something is corrupted and it won't boot up. I got the new laptop to replace the one with the dead power supply, which I got about four months ago to replace the one with the fried hard drive. You sense the pattern? And it's not just IT - my wife is convinced I give off laptop death rays or something.

Fortunately, a co-worker had just gotten a similar laptop and he'd yet to set it up for the mobile video-production system he's planning, so I'm using that for the nonce (and yes, he fully knows my history; lent me the thing anyway, but then, he doesn't have anything valuable on it yet). All this means little or no posting today, since I now have some work to make up - and my RSS aggregator is, of course, on the laptop now undergoing emergency brain surgery.