Lappies losing its mind

HP Lappies decided that the week that I am travelling and need it to take notes on it (it is a funky tablet PC) and of course it decides now is a good time for the harddrive to start to fail. It all started on the plane on Monday morning and has not stopped since. Takes the lappie over 30 mins to boot and longer if I want to do anything with it.

Turns out that the harddrive has some bad blocks (as opposed to happy or good blocks?!) and it is on its last leg. I am getting the same error in the event log every 7-8 seconds... which can't be helping things!

Only fix that I have found is a new harddrive, which luckily is on order now. That still leaves me with a machine that barely works and I need to type up all the session notes from the day on it. I went to Best Buy after leaving the site and got an external drive so that I can back everything up just in case the whole thing dies on me before I get home and I am backing it up now. Although I am typing this from the lappie and it is ok... seems that as long as I do not hibernate or power it down I may be ok... fingers crossed I do no experience a blue screen of death! And if I do, then I have a client customer I should be able to use to type any notes up on. Sigh... never easy is it?!