DELL NON-HELL: The Dell Laptop was dead as a doornail tonight. Wouldn’t boot, even in safe mode, producing a stop code and an “Unmountable Boot Device” error message. Called Dell Support, expecting it to be a bad hard drive. Waited more-or-less patiently as they got me to insert the recovery disk and run some diagnostics, and a nice man from Mumbai named (I think) Raktish helped me repair the bad boot sector and then noticed my computer was booting too slowly and took remote control and cleaned up some junk that was slowing things down. Total elapsed time (including about 8 minutes on hold at the beginning): less than an hour. Seems to be working fine now.