My computer's trying to hang itself by the keyboard... and it's a laptop

[The Ancient Warrior]

Sorry I wasn't online at all yesterday, guys.  It's more than just being busy, because my laptop crapped out and now it won't even give me a login screen.  I'm typing this from the library on campus in the middle of working on my term paper, which I had to restart from scratch because I hadn't backed up my files after starting it.  Hopefully I won't lose everything, but I'll see once Tech Support opens in about a half hour.


If worse comes to worst, my laptop will have to be sent directly to Dell for repairs, but only after I'm back home for break (thankfully, I go back Wednesday).  We'll see how it goes, but before I get back to work on the paper, I just want to thank everyone who submitted answers to help the research along.  I should be back in a matter of days.

[Purple Parrots Fan]

Oh dear, that's awful. I know first hand what it's like to have a laptop crash out on me. What with the terrible virus I had last month that wiped out literally everything, and me not having a chance to back anything up. All my music, word documents, MSN chat logs were gone.... yeah it was that bad. Hope everything turns out okay, and good luck with your final exams. Sorry I couldn't help you with your research project. I would have, but I never really knew what to say.

[The Bandit King]

You have my sympathy, my friend...I too know all about computer woes.  I hope your computer is back to normal soon, and I look forward to hearing back from you.

[The Ancient Warrior]

Well, sort of back.  My computer is now working again; it had to go through a full restore, but the guys at ITS were at least able to get it to a point where they could perform a full backup.  I'm trying to piece together what they had and reinstall certain things— I can't just move the files, because according to my dad, Windows does not recognize the programs in the registry unless they're installed normally.

But so far I've reinstalled Flash Player, MSN, AIM and Firefox (12.0 actually isn't all that different from 8.0; I'm guessing Mozilla mostly does only security updates), and I'm trying to reconstruct my Firefox bookmarks right now.  The next couple days will probably be busy as I try to reinstall other things like Adobe Creative Suite, iTunes and the programs I need to use the home printer— not to mention more regular backups, since if things crap out again, I might not be as lucky the second time— but classes are behind me and I'm able to check in from my own computer at home, at the very least.