You are my sunshine

So, last Thursday I replaced my video card to get rid of an annoying, intermittent hum that I was sure was coming from the ailing fan on my video card. I snapped in the new video card and booted up my machine. The hum was back. Crap. That meant it was my CPU fan or my power supply. Given the onboard foolishness of dell, I knew I was in for a long evening. It turned out to go quickly, because as I was messing around with the CPU, I snapped the fan off the processor and bent about ¼ of the tiny hair like pins on the bottom of the processor.

Thursday and Friday night were spent hunched over the box, screwdriver in hand as I tore machines apart, looking to harvest parts from our other retired machines, hoping for a Frankenstein’s monster type solution to my dilemma. I swapped in some new parts but nothing was coming together. Damn it. I had to replace at least my motherboard and my processor. After interviewing a few of the unemployed cases we had in the house, I realized the case would have to be new too. And the RAM. Ugh, the whole proposition set me back about $350 that I didn’t have, but I need a computer for school and the like (WoW).

Saturday was spent in various waiting rooms. The Kaiser visit was too harrowing to recount; I’ve had blood drawn 8 times since May, so you think I would be used to it. The visit to Stevenson Toyota was unplanned, occurring after I heard this clicking noise when I drove. The clicking noise came from the 2 two-inch nails in my tire. I was sinking into the despair that comes when your world feels like it is falling down around you. All the little things go wrong, and you start to prepare yourself for the big things to go wrong.

On Monday, they did. When I went to reinstall Windows on my new hard drive, I noticed that my old hard drive, which had 4 partitions, now only had two and that they were raw partitions. That meant that all of my writing, all my college assignments, my pictures, my MP3s, everything was gone. At that point, I wept.

The bright spot comes from R-Studio data recovery software. I’m not one for gushing editorials, but this software totally saved my ass. For $50, it found and restored all of the above files, complete and intact. I was able to restore my outlook and all my email. I wept again, this time with joy! Thank you, R-Studio. I heart you and would totally take you to the prom. You restored my files and my spirits.