Two Months of Computer Woes - All Fixed!

My computer stress began around 10P on the evening of February 1st. I came home from dinner and bookstore wandering with a couple of girlfriends...and went to check my email, which is a normal occurrence in the late evening...and my three year old Dell laptop says "We have shutdown Windows to protect your data. Would you like to perform a complete data restoration or restart Windows?" I pick the Windows restart option and up pops a blue screen that basically tells me your computer is broken, time to panic.

Now being that the last three years of my life is on my laptop and I haven't backed up a thing, I panicked. I apologize to MO who I called very late, luckily she was still awake, and to SB who had a teary 34 year old texting. Yickes! Well I got some sleep, amazingly. And called Dell in the morning. I heard something about a crashed operating system and the need of disks I didn't have for a possible 90% full restoration. By now I was calmer. And by the end of the day, I had borrowed my mom's laptop to get through the next week of school and had ordered a new laptop from Dell, with a portable hard drive this time around.

I have been moving through the last several weeks ignoring my grey Dell laptop sitting on my dresser and the fact that I really needed to call Dell. The new laptop arrived safe and sound. As a side note, I love Vista and Windows 2007. So, I have been happily functioning in computer land and just didn't want to process everything I had possibly lost through the recesses of my brain. The 2000+ photos, the half-complete family cookbook, the six generations of family history...oh, the list is endless. Then there are all the contacts in Outlook. Seriously, everybody back up your data, just thinking about it made me ill.

Finally, today was the day. I called Dell this morning and after 30 minutes, I have complete restoration. You would not believe how many people, especially male and engineers, told me "good luck" dripping in scarcism. Well to all of them, computers that are broken are not completely hopeless. I have loved my Dell and for three years I never had any problems.

I have now transferred all my data from the old laptop to the new one and the old one is ready to go to my nephew, Ryan. Too all of you regular computer users out there, don't wait to back-up all that data, do it now.