Broken hard drive under warranty? That'll be $116, please.

Dell calls it "Customer Care."

I call it, "A load of hooey."

It all started when I got the dreaded "blue screen of death" on my Dell desktop computer. After much wrangling with tech support, the verdict came in: the hard drive had gone bad. It will be replaced free of charge under warranty.

Over a week later, after spending about 10 hours fussin' cussin' and doing everything but throwing my Dell out the window, a contractor came by and installed the new hard drive.

Then he began to walk away with my old one.

Not so fast, I said. Turns out Dell wants my old hard drive back, and if I don't return it in the postpaid box they provided, they will charge me $116.

The problem with returning my broken/defective hard drive is that it still contains my personal banking information and other data which could be used to steal my identity.

Call me Chicken Little will you? Check the Internet for yourself. Turns out studies (reported by such reputable publications as PC World, etc) have been done where techies have collected old discarded hard drives and recovered financial and personal information.

Even if you have formatted your hard drive, your information is still intact, but the operating system is unable to decode it. Since the info still lingers, it is still there, ripe for the plucking.

The U.S. Department of Defense, by the way, requires a rigorous "wipe" process be applied to all old hard drives, where new data is overwritten over the old so the old info can't be recovered. That is, when they don't want to shred the hard drive entirely with some special contraption.

If the government's that paranoid about hard drive data, we should be too. Especially with all the computer-savvy criminals out there these days.

A police sergeant once recounted to me how many hours he spent trying to clean up his financial records after his identity was hijacked. It went into the hundreds of hours.

Frankly, I've got better things to do with my life.

So I got to wondering why in the world Dell wants my hard drive back so darned much. Then it hit me. The "new" hard drive they gave me was a refurbished part.

Would Dell want to repair my faulty hard drive and give it to another Dell customer, who could then potentially rape my financial identity?

No, my Dell technician told me last week. "We will destroy it."

So why in the world, I asked, does Dell need my hard drive back so darned much?

He couldn't answer. After I stubbornly refused to mail away the faulty hard drive, he said he'd get