One fine day I came into work and overnight my Gateway workstation's boot drive had developed 10,000 bad sectors (maybe more, who counts these things?) Who ind

One fine day I came into work and overnight my Gateway workstation's boot drive had developed 10,000 bad sectors (maybe more, who counts these things?) Who indeed? I called Gateway tech support and said, "Hi, overnight my hard drive got over 10,000 bad sectors and I'd like you to replace it, since it's under warranty." Gateway support: (after going through some really tiresome support nonsense, like power-cycling the machine and verifying a network connection of a computer that can barely boot). "Sorry, we're not going to do that. Your hard drive still has several hundred thousand perfectly good sectors, so it's working fine, no replacement." Me: (facepalm) So eventually through some social engineering I got them to replace the drive (a little play acting involving my manager pretending to yell at me, which got instant sympathy from the Gateway support person. This is a useful tool). Really I just went over to Fry's and bought a new hard drive. But it was the principle of the thing. And I resolvde that the next time I had to call in a hard drive failure, I would say: "Hello, Gateway? My hard drive is ON FIRE and my computer won't boot any more. What do you want me to do?"