I'm sitting here at my laptop waiting for files to finish loading. I was working on something Monday night when the screen froze. I rebooted (many times and in many different ways) and kept getting an Application Error - services.exe wouldn't execute. I ran a diagnostic program that told me my hard drive was failing. I was in shock - to a large extent, I live on my computer! (I was a programmer/sys admin before I became a stay-at-home mom six years ago.)

Yesterday DH and I called a small shop in Plaistow, NH that actually works on computers right there (PC Warehouse). I had a new hard drive installed in my laptop in half an hour, at half the price of some laptop hard drives I found online. I also picked up a small "Mobile Disk" unit. This now holds the old hard drive, and is downloading those files to the laptop. Even though the old hard drive wasn't bootable, most of the data on it is recoverable.

I'll still be spending most of today re-installing programs, but at least I won't lose all of my saved mail, favorites files, photos, saved knitting/quilting/cross stitch patterns, etc. The Mobile Disk unit cost $40, and it's worth every penny. And the $213 I paid for the new hard drive, "express" installation, and Mobile Disk unit is much cheaper than the approx. $1200 I would have spent otherwise on a new laptop!

And the online access was the first thing I had up and running, after re-installing the operating system!