New hard drive seems to be doing the trick. I'm running this on my rebuilt system. Ran the drive through some serious diagnostics first, though. There's something nice and clean about rebuilding a system's applications. A lot of crap gets left out.

An observation on the concept of "deflation" prompted by buying a good-quality high-speed half-terabyte drive for about 70 bucks...

Why do economists wail about the possibility of deflation? Prices have been dropping in the tech industry for better and better products for years now. The result is great gadgets and low prices for everyone. Imagine if food, or cars, started going down in price for better products.

I smell a rat in the Land of Economists. Will think more on this.