#$&#@*@^#(#&@(@)$$
My laptop just went down!!!**&#@@^@&!@(!&@#(@
I have all of my critical files backed up on our ftp … but all my other stuff ISN’T backed up @#&%$@^@(#&#@(!&!&*$&@!
I just needed to vent!
Here Matt I think you’re avatar is perfectly appropriate. 
Your files are probably not lost, just harder to access.
I hope you can somehow get your stuff back - but even if not - at least you had backups of the most important files. it’s happened to me before that the pcs HD would just start to disintegrate (had to buy a new one) and many files were lost. I’ve really got to get a back up of my important files made… :-S I don’t have one right now.
good luck with your pc problems, and don’t throw your laptop out of your window or something - much more healthy to just vent your frustration a bit more in this thread
Do I detect an undocumented Microsoft feature?
computers die when you’re working on a document over about 12,000 words i’ve found by experience. it’s not just murphy’s law, i killed 2 computers in the last few weeks of my thesis at uni. not just a memory problem, the motherboard died each time or a problem with one of those initial sectors of the hard drive which means you can’t fix it (or at least couldn’t back then, don’t know about computers anymore)!?! i had to rewrite a 14,000 word essay once and almost twice. i think it’s because you get paranoid so you start saving every 3 seconds and it can’t cope
Commiserations, Kopio. Perhaps more of your files were “critical” than you realised.
This reminded me that a colleague of mine attended a computer security show recently. He returned with excited tales of a new device he’d seen for securely destroying data. Take your hard disk and place in machine. Press red button. After some moments of noise reminiscent of a coffee grinder a pile of impressively uniform granules is dumped out the other end.
Come to think of it, maybe it was a coffee grinder.
Good News…I was able to get my laptop to boot and run long enough to copy over 4 700MB Cd’s of all my personal stuff (that doesn’t include my music, but I actually OWN most of my 3 gigs of music on CD) I was in the process of forwarding all of my e-mails to a gmail account I created to backup my e-mails when my ISP branded me as a spammer and stopped me from transmitting anything, a little after that it started making crunching sounds and it died alltogether. I renewed my warranty with Dell (they gave me a break…it ran out on 4/1/05 but they let me re-up on the 14th) so I should be getting a visit from a tech next week that should be able to get it up and running. I think I might see if I can upgrade my HD while I’m at it…30 gigs just doesn’t go that far anymore.
I still have 2 other computers at home that are very good, but I will miss not being able to haul my laptop to school to study (between the wife and the dig here it can be tough to concentrate)!
Thanks for all of your concern and kind thoughts/prayers.
glad you could get some of your stuff backed up and lucky you can get someone from Dell to come and fix it 