My Adventures With Computers

I am dangerous with computers. I have just enough knowledge to make me feel some level of competence, enough to fake more knowledge than I actually have, whilst being entirely clueless in most things concerning them. The small amounts of information I have picked up from two ex-boyfriends, my brother and various techie friends means that I dislike paying for someone to do something (like, fix my computer) because I'm sure I could do it for free if I had the time to research the problem.

I spilled water on my laptop recently. Not Valerie, my £250 notebook, but my 16", £700+ machine which I have used for 4 years for university stuff and gaming. I feel stupid, to say the least. It kind of turned on a couple of times after I left it to dry, but 9 times out of 10 it didn't get past the loading screen. Given that I hadn't backed up ANYTHING on it, this is concerning for me. I did have back-ups on Valerie, but I recently switched her to Ubuntu and hadn't got around to going through the back-up process again. So, feeling like an idiot, I trekked into Best Buy with my laptop to ask if they could fix it. Also somewhat stupidly, I did not ask the cost of backing up my data and getting an estimate before the woman was almost done with the paperwork. $100 to back up the data, $35 in shipping to get it to their technical centre so someone could take a look at it. $100!! For something that my brother could easily do for free, or that PC World in the UK would probably do for about $40. I said "Um, no thanks" and walked home again. Feeling like an idiot. Why did I walk home? Because I'm pretty sure I can at least do the backing up myself. As long as they hard drive is ok...

So I spent an hour in the afternoon searching for the right screwdriver and very carefully removing the hard drive. Success! I ordered a hard drive enclosure (which should arrive today) so I can try and use it as an external hard drive and get all my files off it, before putting the hard drive back and finding someone to give me an estimate for actually fixing it. Luckily I'm not stupid enough to poke around the insides and try to work out what's wrong myself. Hopefully it can be fixed...

And of course, this happens the week before the next Guild Wars 2 beta weekend. No gaming for me :(