Wednesday night I noticed my laptop was funnier than normal. Late afternoon I closed it so I could spend time with Libby and then it never came back on. I was hopeful it would just be a quick fix and so I took it to Best Buy on Thursday. After two hours after waiting in line and talking with people from the 'Geek Squad' that knew even less than I did about hard drives in laptops, they told me it looks like my hard drive went bad. The guy put the hard drive in some magic machine to see how bad and how hard it would be to recover the data and it couldn't even read the thing. It was a bit more than I could take. You see it was my first time out solo since having Libby and I had only planned on being gone for maybe an hour (maximum). Then for them to tell me that my computer with 3-4 years worth of data is dead? I just thought of the 2000+ pictures, tax information, budget information...I could go on and on....that I just 'lost'. So I just stood there with the bad news and the prospect of spending $600-1500 to recover this precious information and cried. It didn't help there was a woman next to me with a newborn baby girl which made me miss Libby. So I called Jim to see what he wanted me to do. Best case scenario was that they could put in a new hard drive in my old laptop for $400, ship the hard drive off and recover the data for $600, and they tell me my computer would be 'as good as new'. Well, uh, yeah? For $1000 it better be new....and that was the cheapest it would have been to recover my data. He thought it would be the highest level to recover it - $1500 - which I kid you not, he said it would require them to be in a clean room with biohazard suits to get it out. He said that to me to justify how much it cost. I don't think he expected me to laugh and then just say I want my laptop back so I can kick it in the parking lot. So, I called Jim and we decided that we would have them run a diagnostic test for $65 and I got a new computer (since I would have spent more to get my old one 'returned to normal'). I had no idea how hard it would be to try to recreate what I had with my old computer while taking care of a newborn. Each of them have their own challenges but you can't focus on one at a time...so needless to say, 2 full days later, I am still no where close to having this computer being fully functional. Really I am just missing mailing addresses from people (I lost my entire wedding list and updated addresses for the past 2 years) and my 2000+ songs. Loading hundreds of CDs into iTunes just makes me shudder...but I am slowly getting there. The first thing I need to fix is the address list so I can get the birth announcements out. So, for those of you reading this, and have recently moved (in the last 2 years), if you don't get an announcement or if I email you asking you for your address and you think i'm flaky, sorry! I'm trying to start over from scratch!
Oy! Computers!
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