Well,I finally made it back. About 2 weeks ago my laptop,2000 model Sony Viao, crashed.I normally do my evening surfing in the living room while watching TV with my wife. When I went to start it up that night,as it finished loading,it showed a warning that a registry file was not loaded(or something like that).It said that Windows Registry Troubleshooter could repair it,so I clicked OK. Never had that come up before so WTH,I thought. After it finished,I was instructed to Restart,so I did. But when it came back up,it was like when I bought it a few years ago(used off eBay)and I had wiped the hard drive and reloaded the programs from the Rescue Discs. All my PDF files wouldn't open, MS Money was gone(year and a half of personal finances), Excel files wouldn't open except by opening Excel first(then open the file),firewall & virus programs not there along with anything else I had loaded since then. Now what! So I saved the PDF,Excel and Word files to a floppy(took a few times),transfering them to my desktop. Then back to the Rescue Discs to reformat the hard drive and start all over again. Then reload all the programs I had(I wrote them down before formatting). Finally I am back to normal,though I did loose most of my Fav sites.Still remembering them as the days go by and resaving them.Luckily I had balanced my checkbook the weekend before and backed it up to a floppy like I always do. Just hope that doesn't happen again for a long while. What a pain in the A@#, :angry: .
Well that doesn't soun like much fun at all. I know exactly what you're talking about with all the Money files. I lost a few months' worth of data and had to type it back in. Only a few months but still a PITA.
I always hated backing up my data files because it was such a laborious and slow process using floppies. USB flash drives are a great solution, IMHO. Now, I'm infinitely more diligent in backing up my files. If you have USB on your computer, a flash drive is an excellent investment.
It's well worth it to save all your files on a drive other than the system drive. That's tough in a laptop. So you might consider making a partition on the drive and saving files you create there. I have double redundancy. I relocate MyDocuments to another drive and every once in a while also use an external USB drive for a back up. That way I have everything in 2 drives and can take the backup drive home. I also use backup software that only copies files that have been modified or new since the last backup. I still have web sites I made back in 1997.
