Blah. I know that feeling. I lost my hard drive on my laptop about a month ago. Lost a ton of information that I hadn't been able to back up. Funny thing is that I knew it was acting up, and began to archive and delete older files. Naturally, I backed up and deleted stuff that was old and I wasn't going to need, and was working my way forward from there. Never got to my 2003 stuff before it crapped out.
We sent out out for data recovery, as it would have been worth the cost rather than my having to recreate a lot of my stuff. Unfortunately, they weren't able to recover anything. They suggested sending it out to another recovery place, but the odds are against being able to get anything useable.
So here I am still trying to break in this new drive and get all my setting back where they had been, and dreading having to re-create a lot of stuff. Blah.
At least I can look forward to getting a DVD-R drive that I can use for backing up stuff. CD-R's don't cut it with some of my files.
The battery went today. I'm hoping the slight difference in amperage will fry the computer so I can get one of them shiny new ones.
