Crash!

Okay, maybe that's too over-dramatic. It was probably more like a whimper in the night. I woke up early a couple Saturdays back and noticed that the computer was left on overnight. It wasn't the blue screen of death that greeted me, but a black screen asking for a boot disk. This didn't bode well either.

Turns out that the hard drive had stopped working. A good friend tried to help me revive the computer enough to retrieve some data, but it wasn't meant to be. We do regular back-ups so we didn't lose much data, but since the automatic back-ups are set for Sunday night we had lost about a week's worth of files. This wouldn't have been too bad, but this particular week included Ethan's science project.

In the end, we recreated Ethan's hard work. This was after we loaded the OS and software on the second hard drive which was still working. We're going to see how much more we can squeeze out of this PC, but we've taken additional precautions like buying an external drive on which we are storing much of our data because we really don't trust the second hard drive after what happened to the first one.

We still may go out and buy that laptop that we've been talking about getting. And we still do have our really old PC that is older than Naomi. A couple years back we upgraded the OS from Windows 98 to XP on this relic of a PC. It only has a 13 GB hard drive so it's really not much use. The kids were using it, but the CD-drive on it failed last year. I bought a replacement drive, but have not installed it yet.