Computer woes

We're leaving town tomorrow and the laptop we bought for this trip four months ago is very ill :( Andy had revived it from it's crash last week and it seemed like it was doing okay... As I re-installed software it was showing signs that it wasn't fully cured, but as the issues came up, Andy'd find a patch or a work around and it seemed to be usable. Until yesterday, that is, when it wouldn't even boot up. Andy recovered it AGAIN with the disk recovery, but a health check has since warned us that hard drive failure is imminent :( ARGGG!! It must have somehow known that it was at the four month mark, past any 90-day return period.

Last night Andy bought a new hard drive, but when he went to install it found that the kind that appeared in manual after all, so he inadvertently bought the wrong drive. And it's apparently hard to find the right kind :(

I'm mostly packed so I'm not that stressed about that, but the computer thing bugs me. Lost with the crash is a post I'd been writing about attachment parenting and explaining why and how friends and family can help support Olivia as she learns to bond with us. I'd pulled info from here and there and stayed up way too late writing it...and now it's all disappeared :( Poof. And yes, I'd saved it, but crashed computers don't care. Reminds me of my college days when my entire term paper vanished within a few hours of it being due. Only this time I have no scribbled notes to refer back to.

Computers...can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em.

P.S. I hope I don't get sued for slander...but it's an HP, if you're wondering. Just now I was about to compliment the 5+ year old Dell laptop that I'm using, but as I tried to type it, things got painfully slow and when I got the "NOT RESPONDING" message, I thought this post was going to disappear, too. I sense dissension in the ranks. If all else fails, we can take this old machine, but it is slow and doesn't have a DVD burner to offload photos. I don't know if it's got enough power or memory for posting video clips... Not the end of the world, but not what we want to be dealing with the day before we leave.