Our week!

So it was a long week without all of you but I did get a lot done! We had no computer or Internet so what else was I to do besides clean and de-clutter my house? Well and play tractors with Logan, of course! ;)

It started Sunday night with the wind storm. Luckily, we never lost power. Oh how thankful I am for that! There were 4 of us on our street that were lucky enough to avoid the outages. Everyone else surrounding us were without power for days. We did lose cable for a day, but I'll take that any day over losing power and water.

Our computer did however freeze and then would not restart. We kept getting an error message. Oh no! We have the last 2 years worth of pictures on there!! Some I have saved to CD's, but not even close to all of them. So I called Dell in a panic and of course our warranty had expired a few months ago so there was nothing they could do to help us. All I wanted at this point was to save my pictures.

On Monday morning I call Staples and they say that for $99.99 they can backup all of our files for us and then we can restore our computer back to factory settings. Great! $100 is well worth me getting all of my pictures back! So I take it in and 2 days later they call and say that the hard drive is fried and they are unable to retrieve any data that was stored on it. OMG! I was sooo upset.

So I talked with my mother-in-law and she said that her friend was willing to replace the hard drive for us and restore the computer. Sounds good to me. Then I do not have to pay anyone else to do it. So she takes it Wednesday night and gets the new hard drive put in. Thursday afternoon I get a call that she was able to retrieve EVERY.SINGLE.PICTURE on my computer! I was ecstatic! She is my new HERO!! How she was able to do this when the tech support at Staples was not is beyond me, but I am so thankful!!!

So all in all, it wasn't a horrible experience but one that I never wish to go through again. My husband tells me that I rely on the computer for too many things. I think he is right. I do not even know how to make my car payment without the Internet. I pulled out a phone book for the first time in 5 years, I believe. I had to do telephone banking rather than Internet banking for the first time since Internet banking was available. The list goes on and on....

Needless to say, my files and pictures are all backed up on 2 hard drives and a soft drive. All pictures are burnt onto CD's and I vow to never download another picture without immediately copying it onto a re-writable again. This too.close.for.comfort "accident" has sure taught me a lesson. And all of you readers out there----learn from me----please go backup your pictures and files immediately! Not tomorrow....not later tonight....go do it now! :)

Well...that pretty much sums it up.

Enjoy your weekend everyone!