grrrr. woke up yesterday morning, flipped the switch on the computer and it made a noise that sounded like " blip", I looked at the screen which said "hard drive not detected, insert boot disk" long story short, new computer was boughtened (housing, power supply, chip, motherboard, RAM and my first official copy of windows in a long time), figured out BOTH my drives (I had the 40 gig main drive and an 80 gig data drive) appear to be shot and non working. last backup of data etc, April 25, 2007. I have lost a big pile of invoices and pictures and such, I will be re-installing software for at least another day. trying to find my software CD's (nero, norton etcetc).
I will be buying a 2gig flash usb drive today and instilling a new best practice of vital data backup each night before shutdown. it would have saved me hours of work and agony.
the one bright point, I managed to build from the new parts in boxes, gutted parts from the old machine (CD, DVD, extra housing fan, 3.5 inch drive, internet connections etc ) in under 2 hours with a screwdriver and unopened
instruction booklet.
oh, new stuff including windows cost me a shade under $500, I think that was being discussed recently around here somewhere.
my reasoning behind the new cpu rather than replacing the drive in the old beast is that the old beast was a 5 or 6 year old cpu and chip so I figured it was reasonable to upgrade at the same time instead of just repairing.