I was able to get some replaced by manufacturers at no cost but we had to pay for the majority of them.

I have tried all manufacturers and in most cases when a machine is used excessively to process video and or transfer huge amount of data we lose the hard drive in about 1 year.  

I have been searching for high altitude hard drives but I have not been able to find any that has specific high altitude design specifications.  The interesting observation is that my 3rd generation 30G iPod still works. I dropped my iPod in snow while skiing, I dropped it on rocky hiking trails on the deck and once it dropped and bounced down the cement driveway leaving few nice dents in it.

Next time you decide to take your laptop with you on your ski vacation, seriously, back up your data before traveling or risk loosing your data, especially if you are in the habit of moving your notebook around while it’s turned on.

The steering wheel is just fantastic and I am still not sure what function they had in mind for such an apparatus except for releasing steam pressure from the water based cooling system.

One could only imagine how computers would look like in 50 years, most likely future generations will view my lovely macbook as a ridiculous object the same way we view this fancy computer concept put together by the RAND corporation back in 1950.

The concept of a keyboard has been out there for a while as the input method of choice. As we advance our knowledge in the field of VLSI or even possibly a totally different computing technologies that will unleash new processor speeds, we will witness a shift from physical input device to speech and gesture based input.