Back to life with a new brain

Not me, my laptop. (Although I feel my brain has been on the fritz lately.)

After a hard drive crash on April 1st (Yup, no foolin'), my system was corrupted to the point where I could not even get to a DOS prompt. I tried everything I could think of and was pretty sure the drive was fried. But, I reluctantly called Dell support in the hopes that they could bring it back to life and if not, the would send me a new drive.

I spent over an hour on the phone with them doing EXACTLY THE SAME THINGS I did earlier in the day. I will say that I was pleasantly surprised with the person I was working with. I believe that there is a good chance I got a higher level of support because I purchased this through the employee plan at my old company. Anyway, sometime after midnight it was pretty clear that nothing was going to work.

I received my replacement drive on Friday (with all the software already installed that you very much) and have been spending a good part of the weekend reconfiguring everything to how I like it.

Unfortunately I never backed up my laptop. I am not terribly upset because all our photos/videos are stored on the other system. I did lose my iTunes library but I have an old backup (years ago) and can recover anything I purchased from iTunes from my iPod and iPhone. I did lose any updates to our Christmas card address list that were made in the past 6 months. Also gone? All the personal files I felt were important enough to copy from my work laptop before I quit. Sigh.

Last night I BACKED UP using the free year of off site backup that I never bothered to set up before. I still have a few more things to try and recover from the random external drives and CDs floating around here. I am hoping to have a real post here soon.

(Oh, just remembered I need to install the Windows software that allows me to create a post things. Now if I can only remember what it is called. Ah, Google. What would I do without you?)

(Crap. Also remembered that one of those personal files lost was a recording of the first time we heard Meghan's heartbeat on the ultrasound. I hope I can find that on one of the external drives....)