Thanks, Apple!

After years of faithful service, my Sony laptop's hard drive failed. Unsatisified with any of the current laptops on the market, I decided to try to upgrade my drive instead. Problem: Sony uses a type of drive that is hard to find locally, and I need the laptop for a trip next week, so ordering a new one online is difficult.

While looking up the replacement drive on the web, though, I noticed a lot of hits for "ipod" showing up -- turns out, the same drive in my laptop is also in the Apple iPod 3rd and 4th generation players.

Well, Laurel and I have an old 20-gig 2nd gen iPod ... would it work? I popped it open, pulled out the drive, put it in my laptop, and voila -- XP is setting up as I type.

The only bad thing is that the iPod drive was 20 gigs instead of the 40 I had in there before, but this is plenty for my trip and gives me lots of time to order a larger drive!