Whew! Rough week but I'm still standing!
Laptop crashed and burned last Monday evening! Panic? Not yet. Tried everything we could think of for two days to coax the machine to cooperate and come back up. Turn it off/turn it on. F8 to start in safemode. But all it did was cycle off and on. Okay now the panic is ebbing in. Although I, for the most part, save my documents and back up the system on a regular basis, I hadn't saved them in several days! Okay, I told myself, you can recover them from the hard drive. That is assuming the hard drive isn't damaged, as well. Oh but we won't go there as I am a 'glass is half full' type of gal:)
Okay, I call a friend who aids me in removing said hard drive and go get a nifty adapter/box so I can test the waters to see if it is, in fact, okay. It is! And as luck would have it I have a borrowed back up laptop because wouldn't you know, like the girl scout I used to be, I am pretty much always prepared. My particular laptop, a HP Pavillion Plug and Play, is involved in a class action law suit of which I have recently filed my claim. So onward and upwards. But... Yes there's that incessant but. Little by little things trickled into my mind that were most likely lost. One such thing was my AOL filing cabinet. All my important files regarding correspondence bit the dust--we are talking years of stuff that were necessary keeps!
Lesson here: if you do nothing else on a daily basis back up your system, your files, and your mailboxes!
I do have a happy ending, however. Although my filing cabinet and all correspondence as of Monday are toast along with my laptop, I brought a brand new laptop yesterday, have the promise of a replacement machine from HP sometime in the near or distant future(who knows with litigation cases), and a lot more techie knowledge than I ever had:) Next purchase: A large external hard drive that will be programmed to back up system daily!
D~
