Crash

My big laptop crashed last night, after two years of trying to take the place of my main PC.  It only had half a gig of memory.  I bought it in...2004, I think it was, after I'd gone to Donald Maass' week-long Breakout Novel Intensive course, which the Moxie affectionately dubbed "boot camp."  The old laptop I had at the BONI had shutdown issues; it sometimes took multiple tries to get it to shut down properly.  So after I returned home, I bought my big laptop especially for the purpose of going to writer's conferences with it.  It weighs 8 pounds and is a chore to lug across an airport concourse, but it has a nice large screen and multiple USB ports, and was the best thing for the money at the time I bought it.

Since I never intended to use it all that often at home, and because I'm not as tech savvy as I should be, I never made a recovery disc for it.  I never expected to need it; it was only supposed to be my travel computer for writing, and I never expected it to hold all of my data and function as my main computer.  So now it's toast.  It passes the hard drive test, but will not boot up Windows.  I lost some data there--not my writing, it seems; because I use the little red laptop just often enough, I had copies of the writing files on it and on thumb drives.  But until we see if we can recover the data on the hard drive, I've lost email addresses, about two years' worth of emails, and some pictures, not to mention a few downloads of songs on Windows Media Player purchased from Amazon, plus all my playlists that weren't on the red laptop.

When the PC was about to die, it gave me warning, and I had everything backed up in time and lost virtually nothing.  This time, however....not the same situation.

The little red laptop is a wonderful computer.  I love it.  But it doesn't even have a CD drive, so I can't rip or burn CD's, play DVD's, or make backups on CD.  Everything has to be transferred via thumb drive.  So I'm off to buy a new 8 gig thumb drive while they're on sale, because after the PC died, I learned from experience that the entire contents of my writing folders, etc. can be contained on two 8 gig thumb drives.

Talk about traveling light....