I have not had the world's best history with computers. The first laptop I ever owned was stolen on one of the safest college campuses in the country. The second one turned out to be a lemon, and by the time it became clear that whatever was wrong wasn't fixable, the company had gone bankrupt. But even in these two instances, I've never had a computer completely "crash," where one day things were working pretty hunky-dory, and the next nothing.
Well, now I have. Our desktop computer, the one we primarily use and on which Wes has all his information saved, is fried. I came home on Thursday when Wes was at work, turned it on, and got a message to the effect that something really important that makes the computer work at all was either missing or corrupted. The missing made Wes nervous; the corrupted made me nervous.
Wes made some phone calls to both the Geek Squad and Dell. The former was going to be very expensive and would not have included any subsequent parts that needed purchased. The latter, fortunately, turned out to be just the opposite. Turns out when I bought the computers, I paid an extra $100 or so for an extra 3 years on our one-year warranty. We are in that last year. And since Dell is a big, established company, they haven't gone bankrupt. Wes talked with a lady for an hour. When she couldn't figure out what was wrong, she got a supervisor. When, after an hour, they still couldn't fix the problem, they told Wes that someone would be out next week with a replacement hard drive -- at no additional cost.
The good news is that we won't have to spend any money to fix this problem. It makes me nervous that we had a computer working fine one day and dead the next, but I'll chalk it up to the issue of that hard drive and not the company's computeres in general. The very, very bad news is that we had almost nothing on that computer backed up. We lost our music, which isn't a big deal since most of it was from CDs we own or can be repurchased from ITunes pretty cheaply (and some of it's sitting on our IPods). We lost all of Wes's documents, and I'm truly shocked he's not more upset about it than he is. He just says, "What can we do about it?", but I know it's got to upset him -- his files contained all of his medical school work, residency tests, papers he's written, including the text for the chapter that will soon be published, and data for current research. He has a few things saved on his jump drive, but not much.
The saddest part of this is that we lost all of our digital pictures from the past two years, including everything since we moved to Chicago. As we got to talking, we did realize that a lot of our most beloved pictures are either on the blog or on CDs we gave to family members who wanted to those same photos. I will be emailing those family members immediately to try and get the CDs back. I guess that is the one benefit to digital images -- not only could they have been backed up somewhere, but they kind of are in different forms.
Wes and I have learned our lesson about backing up our information. Since all my old files are saved on the laptop (which we're using in the interim -- thank goodness we own two computers) and my jump drive, I will be backing those up TODAY. Please take this lesson from us if you don't practice this habit already yourself.
And if you have any of our pictures -- or Wes's files! -- would you send them along?
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