I'm Back

I have my computer again - finally. (Do I need to apologize for not blogging?)

I know it shouldn't have taken that long but it did. Here's the story.

On Thursday (December 27th) I heard a high squeaking sound from my computer and the Powerpoint presentation I was looking at refused to load. I tried to fix permissions (equivalent to running a program to make sure your registry items are accurate in a Windows machine) but that took a really long time and didn't help. I realize now I should have stopped everything and tried to back up my recent work. I realized my last backup was a few months ago and I lost my emails, addresses, bookmarks and some of the work I had done. I lost some recent docs I had been working on and most disappointing was that I had lost all of the recent audio recording I had done with my daughter. I think I lost some photos and some songs but those were not significant and can be replaced (songs) or copied from my wife's computer - which has all our recent photographs.

On Friday, I took it to a friend of a friend to get it repaired. You know the drill - my friend (a Mac guru who I called on Thursday evening) said "I know someone who fixes Macs out of his home. He's a great guy and can do it real cheap!" My friend's friend told me it should be ready soon - maybe even this evening but Monday for sure! Wow! Great!

On Monday I found out that my friend's friend's Mac expert was out of town on vacation over Christmas and New Year. Tuesday was New Year's Day. Wednesday I went snowboarding with Jared. Thursday was busy so I called on Friday. The response? The hard drive they ordered hadn't come in yet. Monday I called again. It should be in today. On Tuesday they told me they were having difficulty finding the hard drive I wanted - shortages due to the Christmas season.

So Tuesday afternoon I picked it up and took it to CPUSED (or BeamEcho) the guys I originally was going to take it to. It was ready by Wednesday at lunchtime - and at a cost roughly the same as what the other guy would have charged me.

The lesson in all this ... ?

Backup! Backup! Backup!

And go with the guys you know will fix it fast and right.