So much for conventional wisdom

In the two times I've had to study PC hardware in my schooling, certain things were passed on as accepted wisdom. Interestingly, some of the material I had to memorize, regurgitate and try to forget is contradicted by the Real World.

This hit my radar simply because the hard drive on my (Dell) PC at work started generating error messages about a bad sector and within--if I remember correctly--less than a hour just crashed and burned. (When your I/T dude says, "Wow, I've never seen one go down that hard that fast," you know you're in trouble...)