The final machine: Intel Core 2 Quad at 3.6GHz, 1.1-TB hard disk, 2GB RAM, NVidia GeForce 8800GT w/512MB RAM

Grr… just sliced my finger open. Grr. Gonna be one of those days.

I am the world’s worst sick person. I accept this.

It’s 9:02… and down goes Outlook (even though I’ve been using it for 40 minutes).

Ooh… my 1TB of hard drives just arrived — a day early!

Ooh, Outlook didn’t wait — it crashed at 8:47 today!

This stuff comes up once in a while, and once in a while I like to revisit my own usage to keep up with times. So here’s the latest guide to usage of common Internet terms:

Internet: takes a capital I, assuming you’re referring to the giant worldwide computer network, as opposed to another collection of interconnected computer networks — and yes, there are others. It’s the Internet, not an internet. For the same reason, for example, you capitalize Church when referring to the (Catholic) Church but not when referring to the building on the corner near you.

Web: Likewise, takes a initial cap if you’re referring to the World Wide Web. There’s only one, so it’s a proper noun. You could also refer to your company’s internal web of documents, in which case it’s lower case.

webmaster, web site: Lower-case W in these cases, because they aren’t proper nouns as they refer to generic people (in the case of the former) and HTML-based documents (in the latter). This is a departure from what I’ve used before, in which I’ve capitalized “Web site.”

e-mail: Lower-case E unless, obviously, it starts a sentence. Hyphen is preferred, but not mandatory; it just looks better. Also, there are cases when the phrase “electronic mail” would be hyphenated, so “e-mail” should as well. For example, “Webmail.us is an electronic-mail service.” Ergo, it’s simpler to always hyphenate it — “Webmail.us is an email service” would be grammatically incorrect.

Defend your incorrect views in the comments. ;-)

Ah, it’s 8:54 and time for Outlook to crash. Every morning. [sigh]

All right, this was a combination of weird and annoying. Seagate tells me that my hard drive’s warranty expired pretty much the day it was built.

Back in late 2006 or early 2007, I bought a pair of 320-GB Barracuda 7200.10 drives. One failed today — I mentioned that in my previous post. It got noisy and Seagate’s SeaTools software gives it the thumbs down.

So I went to Seagate’s Web site to see about returning it; it’s within the three-year warranty. But the site tells me it’s not under warranty. So I called Seagate.

The customer service rep tells me the warranty expired in October 2006. Huh?

First of all, Seagate only announced the 7200.10 series in mid-2006. More importantly, the date code on the drive is 07141 — this means (I learned), it was built 14 weeks into Seagate’s 2007 fiscal year (which begins July 2006). In other words, it was made in October 2006!

I explained this to the nice warranty person, who agreed that there was a three-year warranty, but that they would only honor it if I had a receipt, which I don’t. I repeated that the 7200.10 series is less than three years old, and further, that the date code proved that. They don’t need a receipt to know that it’s within the warranty period.

He insisted the warranty expired in October 2006.

“If the warranty expired in October 2006,” I pointed out, “that would mean it started in 2003. But you didn’t make the 7200.10 in 2003!”

Warranty Guy agreed, but said he couldn’t do anything without a receipt, even though Seagate’s own sticker on the drive shows it’s less than two years old.

So I escalated this to a supervisor. After a few minutes, he agreed to “extend” the warranty for me. Extend it beyond zero days, I guess. I’m glad the company is willing to do this, but it’s kind of annoying to have to argue about a three-year warranty on a two-year-old product.

Addendum: I just bought replacement drives – two 500-GB, 7200-RPM beauties. From Western Digital. (If Seagate comes though, those will be my backup drives. I’m not feeling trusting.)

Addendum 2: Weirdness. I removed the bad drive, but kept its twin. I then ran a piece of free software called DiskCheckup that tells me lots about the drive, including its model and serial numbers. When I enter those into the Seagate site, it comes back with a warranty expiration of October 2011. But I bought these drives at the same time — as a RAID pair. Go figure.

So my hard drive is making noise. This is a warning to me. I’ve backed it up completely, so I’m not worried about data loss, but I’m debating the replacement and looking for advice.

Let’s say I want 500GB. Here are my options:

1. Buy one 500-GB drive. Simple, inexpensive, easy.

2. Buy two 250-GB drive and put them in a RAID-0 configuration for more speed. (My motherboard makes that easy.) I have a solid backup plan in place, so I’m not worried about the increased failure risk. This is moderately more expensive and more complex.

3. Buy two 400-GB drives and use the built-in Intel Matrix Storage system to create a RAID-10 system. It combines RAID-0 speed with RAID-1 redundancy, but at the cost of some space — that 800 GB would really be only 500 GB.

[scratching chin] Decisions, decisions. Advice and recommendations?