Hard Drive Recovery, at what cost?

My tenant’s girlfriend’s computer lit on fire and suffered a rather severe hard drive crash.  He asked me to look at it telling me the drive held important stuff and I started running drive recovery.  The progress was glacial but I bore through knowing “it was important”.  I recovered the first set of data which yielded a collection of emails in txt-speak about concert tickets.  My resolve waned.  I kept it spinning for a day or two more seeing it’s estimated completion time was around Candlemas thinking it’d magically speed up.  The final straw was when files for WinAntiVirus 2009 (a virus program) and I snapped.  This computer was dead, it deserved to die, the hard drive was simply the device who decided to end itself.

After seeing its pain, I’m thinking of having a new mission in life: create something to cause hard failures in PCs and become the Kevorkian of computers.