Update

It is my hard drive, an expensive repair, so I've opted for a new laptop that will have a better battery life and faster processing speed. My old computer was a good one, and I'm going to miss it like an old friend, but am looking forward to making friends with the new one. Thankfully, I had a current backup done through Mozy. Mozy is a great service that allows you to schedule online backups of specific files and folders on your computer, and the backup is stored with Mozy if you ever need it. I've needed it once, with a former laptop, and the restore was easy enough.

Maybe I'll be back in business by the end of next week.