PC Woes

Computer trouble, which I always find stressful has been prevented work over the past few days. It might be that I need a new hard drive. This PC which is only five months old only worked correctly for the first ten days. After that intermittent driver errors, which I think were caused by a loose cable in the casing, caused lots of problems and meant that I had to boot three or four times each time I wanted to turn the machine on. More recently Windows freezes completely with the hard drive light fixed on or fluttering wildly, a classic sign of impending hard drive failure, which would come as little surprise because for the past month it's been making a sound like a stick being held in a fan. Today I've defragmented, which crashed Windows, then ChkDisk kicked in, then I did a virus check just in case. All is clear. I am now prepared to buy a new hard drive, and reinstall Window XP because my OEM Vista came pre-installed and I can't restore it if the hard drive fails. Losing Vista is no real loss. I can't use Windows 7 because my modem isn't compatible. I expect a week of lost productivity. That's a lot.