More memory on the way

esterday I finally bought more memory for my Mac. A couple of weeks ago, my Mac did some ummm...foolish things. I was working on a spreadsheet, had Firefox open, Apple Mail and I believe I was just working between those three windows. I got to save my spreadsheet to my thumbdrive and it wouldn't save. This thing straight objected to saving anything. So, I went to eject my thumbdrive and Mac wouldn't eject it so I just yanked it out. Now, my computer tells me that I shouldn't have done that blah blah, but who pays attention to all of that...oh you probably do lol. I knew the thumbdrive was fine, I put it back in, went to try and save again after closing the prog for the spreadsheet and opening it again and it did the same thing! So then it tells me it can save my spreadsheet in some temp folder instead and I save it but I don't know where to retrieve a damn temp folder on here and I can't just have it floating around on my mac as it holds important info. So, I said f it and restarted. I went to restart and I left the room. I'm gone maybe 5 minutes. I come back and every program has shut down, but my desktop background is staring me in the face, looking all lonesome with nothing else on the screen. I'm like, umm, what's the deal? I close my Mac. I open it back up. Still on the desktop background. I had to force a shutdown. WTF??? I've had my Mac now for about ohhh, 3 years and some months. Aside from an issue with my iSight (had it replaced once), I haven't had anything like this happen before.

Fast forward to me making an appt. with the Apple store and bringing in my Mac. They ran some sort of diagnostic on my hard drive (after asking me 3 times if it was okay because apparently I could've lost EVERYTHING...do your weekly backups folks). Whilst running this diagnostic, it finds an error or some sort of damage to my hard drive! I had no clue that actual, physical damage could happen to a hard drive. I was told that my Mac being moved around, sat down, or possibly bumped could cause the problem. Uhh, it's a laptop, that happens right? Right. So he says that the hard drive is like a vinyl record and the needle can "scratch" the disk. Somehow it magically repairs itself with a press of a button and all is well and I haven't had any probs. My Mac still starts up slowly and progs take a bit longer than they should to open so I purchased another gig of RAM. I'm going to install it myself and hopefully I don't screw it up. To have Apple do it they charge you 30 bucks. Kinda pricey for just unscrewing something and putting something in a slot. I'll post an update on this later and hopefully it all works out.