I’m back in action!

Published September 28th, 2008

I just wanted to take a few minutes to thank everyone for their kind emails and comments over the last week. As many of you know my laptop suddenly died and I was checking the site from my local library until I could get things sorted out and up and running again. The Toshiba laptop I have was the top of the line in its day, and is outfitted quite nicely, so I was very sad to hear that it was what they call “IDE=0″. There was good news and bad news. Contrary to my usual, I will talk about the bad news first because it’s easier to explain. The computer guy we went to see did some diagnostics and confirmed that the problem was the hard drive. They tried other hard drives in my computer and were able to get it to work, but when they plugged my hard drive into other machines it was a no-go. So, since my hard drive has some kind of a problem in the mechanism, they were not able to recover any of my data. The hard drive will have to be shipped of to a special data recover place where it will have to be taken apart in a dust-free “clean room” until they can figure out which component is the problem. The estimated cost is anywhere between $100 and $1000 depending on how long it takes and what they have to do to recover the data. The data is priceless to me as it contains a couple thousand pictures of my family and friends, including my much-loved dogs. No, I did not have the foresight to back everything up as I went along

On the good news front though, the odds of them being able to get my info out are good, and we didn’t have to buy a new laptop right away. We had the original recovery CDs that came with the computer, so the technician put a new hard drive in, re-loaded the software, configured and updated everything for us. We definitely do still plan on buying a new laptop, but we’d wanted a second one anyway so we could both work online without having to work around each other. I hate having to make and research big purchases in a rush, so I’m glad that things worked out the way they did. In the end, for $220 we got a new 160 gig hard drive, had everything diagnosed, installed, configured, updated, and are up and running. The only thing I had to do myself was call Bitdefender and help them to get my firewall and other virus protection downloaded and set up again.

I am very thankful that it sounds like I can get my pictures back, and also grateful to Scott at “Computer Geeks On Call” for all of his help and the many hours he spent getting us back up and running. From a personal finance perspective, I’m glad I have the time to save up for a new laptop and for the data recovery. Having to spend at least a couple thousand dollars right now before we have to go on our big trip to the Galapagos would have put us in a very tight financial situation.

In blog news, please look here on Tuesday for the 145th edition of the Festival of Frugality. This is one of the longest running personal finance carnivals around, and I am honoured to have been chosen to host this week (and am infinitely relieved that I have a computer again to do so). Given the events of late, the theme will appropriately be gratitude–see you then!

Amanda

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