Last week, a friend mentioned having had their laptop stolen awhile back. My heart stopped in fear FOR them. I’m that paranoid person who leaves home for work and splits up her laptop from the power cord (after reading it makes it less interesting to thieves because a laptop without power is worthless.) My life is on my laptop. Photos. Finances. Business programs. Everything. Losing my laptop… I couldn’t even…

Then Saturday, it happened. I asked my laptop to do too much. Or something. It crashed. It locked up, wouldn’t do anything, and I did what I always do: a hard reboot.

But nothing happened.

So I rebooted again.

Finally it went into a self-repair. That worked last time! Instead, I got, “I can’t fix myself. Get help.”

No. No no no no no. NoNoNoNoNoNoooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!

So Sunday, when I was supposed to be getting ready to go to a Super Bowl party, I was at Best Buy praying the Geek Squad could save me.

They tried. But they couldn’t even get into the diagnostics. Prognosis: she’s dead, captain. There’s no saving something that they can’t even read to save. S-O-L. Done. R.I.P.

I looked at my husband who just went, “Let’s go find you a new one.”

And we did. Got a GREAT deal on a new laptop. It’s faster. All fresh, clean hard drive. And it has a great graphics card for photo editing that I didn’t even realize I was missing prior to this. Oh and its HUGE. When everyone is going smaller, I went bigger. This will be awesome for photo editing while traveling.

I got lucky on one front. I was sick all week last week. (Hence being so MIA on Social Media and the blog last week.)  I generally keep my laptop hooked up to an external hard drive that constantly backs up new files, but being sick I took the laptop to the couch with me. But even with THAT, I was only on the computer for about two days total last week. So I literally only lost 8 photos. That’s it. Oh and maybe one PDF copy of paying a bill. Otherwise, everything was backed up.

AND I finally delved into using “the cloud” so I could sync things between my laptop, cell phone and iPad. I knew it was awesome for that. I had no idea how it would save me on this front. I installed my web browser. Logged into my account. And ta da! All my stuff was there. Bookmarks. Passwords. Etc.

I have never had to start from fresh on a laptop before where I didn’t have an old laptop to refer to find things. It’s always been a case of transferring files. Trying to remember passwords. Looking for links. I was freaked out that it would not only take days to get back to where I was, I might not be back up and running for MONTHS.

Instead? It look about an hour. And I’m slowly transferring “must have” files from the external drive to the laptop, but I am being very picky what I transfer, allowing me to keep this new computer cleaner longer.

So. Who knew? A computer crash ending pretty positive? Never would have thought that, but that’s what’s happened! Taking it all in stride and realizing it is what it is. I still fear having my computer stolen, but at least now I know… its possible to get back on your feet fairly quickly.  WHEW!