As you should know, a couple of months ago, my laptop went to the repair center to get fixed. Well the story is that I didn’t get the computer back in its full glory. Other than the missing ExpressCard blank, a hole that now fills with dust, I was also left with one dead pixel. You probably think I am crazy for getting annoyed and complaining about one little pixel on my monitor, but it is a big deal. I am getting one less pixel than I should be getting. Not only is it the fact that it’s dead, but its that it died when it was at the repair centers hands. Call me crazy but I blame them for it. I think they were careless and that’s why that poor pixel died.

I do know my poor laptop, the one I treated like a million dollar diamond, perfect, clean and mark less. When it returns to me, it has scratches, it has a giant dust collecting hole in the side, one of the grips on the bottom is gone and one pixel is dead. Just so you know how big of a deal this is, the pixel in question is located just a bit up from the bottom about half a finger on the left. Its well hidden by Vistas black taskbar but I know it is there, a millimeter under the iTunes quick launch icon. It annoys me. I want a perfect screen with every single pixel in working order. Call me crazy but I should be getting all the pixels I paid for, not one less.

This is not the only thing in my possession with problematic pixels. My PSP happens to have a stuck pixel, a damn red one. It is about 2.5 cm from the top and left. You would think it wouldn’t be a problem but it is really irritating when watching a movie or doing something other than pushing buttons in a game. When playing a game, you are so into the game that the pixel becomes invisible, but when doing other things, that red dot is irritating and very noticeable, so much that it is distracting.

When a small dot on a screen with many more pixels dies, its not really a problem if it is out of the way, but a pixel on a small screen close to the middle, now that is just irritating. When will the day come that pixels don’t have problems. One day I would like to now worry about the little guys inside my screens dying or getting stuck, its something that I shouldn’t even think about, but since they are annoying me, I am worried. I am crazy for getting agitated about something so small and insignificant. Maybe I have some kind of disorder, or maybe I just want things perfect!

It had been 11 months since I bought my last external hard drive. All the drives in my house were close to maxing out. Between the 3 hard drives, the external, the one in the desktop and the one in the laptop, there was 30gb of free space combined. Some people would think that is a lot of space, others would say that it is time for a new drive. I knew it was definitely time for a new drive.

The past week, I have downloaded heaps of TV shows due to the releases of the new seasons. I ended up downloading about 25 different shows this week. If each episode is 350mb, thats about 9gb for the week. I would definitely be needing another drive if I planned on downloading full season of each of these shows.

This morning, we were going to the local computer shop to pick up a monitor for the old computer. The previous one had died (and smelt bad too I may add.) We got a nice 19″ LCD monitor, a major upgrade from the 5 year old 15″ CRT display. While picking up that, I grabbed an external drive off the shelf, a Western Digital My Book 500gb. This hard drive will be plenty of room for the next 11 months, hopefully. I currently have plans on getting another drive of double capacity in 11 months time just to start a nice trend.

I copied all the TV shows, movies, and PSP games from my old drive to the new one, leaving only documents and video podcasts to take up space on the old external drive. I really like this external drive too, it is much better than any other one I have seen and tried. It looks very nice and words nice too. The best feature of the drive is that there are no buttons, no switches, it turns it self of with the computer or if you safely remove the drive. This means that I don’t have to worry about powering the drive and such. This would be perfect as a second storage drive for a desktop computer as it would power up and down with the computer without the user having to do anything.

The total of all drives at home now reach 1000gb, which sounds like a lot of storage but really it isn’t. I could easily use it in a short period of time. I am extremely happy with my purchase and would definitely recommend a Western Digital My Book to anyone looking for an external drive. Now I just need to download more TV shows to store on it and need more time to watch everything. Then in a year or so, its time for a terabyte drive for me!