My tweets

• 06:22 morning tweeters. my, you've all been very chatty while i've been asleep. my hdd is about to pack up so making an emergency copy. #
• 16:44 Trains to London cancelled due to freight train fire so on train to Coventry with a very annoying person across from me (more) #
• 16:47 who when he heard my American accent asked "Have you met any celebrities in America?" Thank God Coventry is only 18 minutes away! #
• 17:21 At Coventry - another unruly young man on nuneaton train delayed us while cops met train here. #
• 17:22 @brianheys Karma is why that happens on Friday, and no. #
• 17:43 @chrys I got the impression this gentleman was ever so slightly learning disabled. At least he paid his fare & did not cause a scene. #
• 18:00 On train at Coventry for Euston finally. #
• 18:14 Two Asian women who ping my gaydar pretty strongly are sitting across from me. You go girlz! #

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Computer help needed desperately...

Well, I'm going to be begging for help, so all you computer alpha-experts out there, please take note. I've also posted this to the gaygeeks community.

As y'all will know if you've kept up with your friends' lists, last weekend I installed Windows Vista Ultimate on my Dell desktop computer as an "upgrade" from XP. It has a RAID 0 disk array with something like 400GB of storage space on two drives, 3GB of RAM, dual-core CPU, etc. and so on and so forth. If there is other information that you might find useful in assisting please don't hesitate to ask. The current disk is a Samsung SP2504C, 232.8 GB

I have had nothing but trouble since I installed Vista. First, Microsoft put forward a flurry of Windoze Updates, which drove me mad for about 3 or 4 days before they stopped. Second, various programs do not function correctly in Vista. MailWasher throws up two or four error messages before it starts working; Eudora is not particularly well-suited to Vista and is not recognised as the email program; something called HP CUE was not working, and told me so, very verbosely. But all of these were software problems and, I presumed, after a few weeks' running I'd find solutions to them all.

Yesterday I discovered that there are errors in one of the RAID hard disks. I very quickly took a backup using Norton Ghost to duplicate my C: drive on another drive. That seemed to work OK. However, last night, to my horror, I discovered that my Eudora inbox was empty. The file was zero-length. I copied the inbox over from my backup (and lost a few emails but not many; I can restore them from MailWasher if there are any that I really need). I then copied all of Eudora onto my 16GB memory stick, and will do so again today so that I have a current backup. I may transfer working to one of my laptops so that I will be able to preserve this machine.

The question is: How do I proceed?

1. I will need two hard disks to recreate the RAID array, I presume. Does anyone have recommendations for a good, long-lasting, durable hard disk that would work well in a system that is on 24/7? I won't say that money is no object, but if I buy an expensive set of disks I want them to be worth the money.

2. I don't have the option of moving to a Mac or a Linux system, really. Is there anything about Vista that's poisonous to the kind of system I'm on at the moment and, if so, what can I do about it?

3. Is there any good way of repairing the hard disk or even diagnosing it for repair? I have used CHKDSK and that wasn't too helpful. I'm prepared for a "no" on this one but thought I'd ask.

4. Does anyone have any other advice they think pertinent to my plight? I guess recommending a good backup system that's robust and can work around disk errors would be good--in my opinion Ghost is crapware (ever since Symantec took Peter Norton over the Norton line of products seems to have suffered) but Windows Backup in Vista is even worse. None of these things seem to be disk-fault-tolerant and that is important when you're doing an emergency backup.

Thanks for any assistance anyone can give.