WARNING: Geeky Language Ahead.

So after 2 years and and almost 3 months, my laptop has died. Here's what happened: I start noticing that once and a while, it doesn't boot, and when it does, it likes to spontaneously close programs and blue-screen. "Oh man," I think, "my laptop is dying!" So I get my external hard drive back from Cody with the idea that I can simply back everything up before it gets too bad and then I can try to re-image the hard drive. A simple, but usually effective plan, except that I have no free time to do this until I get two big projects for classes out of the way. So it only needs to last that long.

As I stick in my flash drive to save the projects, it blue-screens and dies. "Well," I tell myself, "this is unfortunate." But then it switches from unfortunate to flat-out sucking when restarting it first gives me a "Cannot find OS" message and -then- doesn't do anything at all but beep.

Desperate to recover my music collection and my documents I download Knoppix, a Linux OS that runs off a CD. It works just fine, and it can get into one partition of my hard drive, but everything's gotten all messed up and all it can get are file names...empty file names. Despairing, I think all is lost.

Until! I happen to come across the hard drive for my old laptop. "Why not?" I think, and stick it in, amazed to see that it boots to Windows 2000 with no problem except that it needs about fifty drivers. "Sweet!" I think, and then shut it down to go play Halo 3 with Cody.

Then I come back to it and find that it's started to crash, too. So I use Safe Mode and everything is, well, safe, for a while, until suddenly it crashes and I again see "Cannot find OS" and that's when I realize the problem isn't the hard drive, it's the motherboard and I may have just bricked two hard drives.

I turned to the epic Matt Perry for help recovering my music collection, and it was mostly re-populated. And, as a last-ditch effort, I ordered a cable to hook up my laptop drives in Melissa's desktop. (This is where it gets good.)

So I managed to fix the partition with the music on it, so my entire collection is saved. The other partition however mostly seemed hopeless, until I came across ZAR, a recovery program, and it managed to salvage most of my documents and my e-mail. So all I really lost that I wanted to keep was 2 years of Trillian chat logs and some pictures. Not bad.

Now I'm trying to figure out whether or not to get another laptop or a desktop, and I have no idea which to get. Any advice?

ALSO: Added irony: I got a job in the TSS (Technical Support Services) department at school, which means I'm finally getting paid to fix computers. When did my laptop start dying? The day I started.

Lay In Bed All Day

I need all the advice you internet lot can give me about waking up in the morning, because it is a curse on my life.

Yes, for starters, it would help if I could lock down the ability to go to bed early enough to get enough sleep and still make it to my earliest class(es). But even when I get enough sleep, I completely lack the ability to get out of bed most mornings and I can't explain why. I just become totally devoid of energy and I just do not want to get up. Often I fall back asleep, but some days I just lay there because I can't talk myself into getting up. And then on the days that this happens, I just spend the rest of the day feeling lame and useless because I wasted my morning.

So far the only idea I've gotten is to get a bunch of Caraboa (sp), a Thai (I believe) energy drink that costs only fifty cents and comes in a small bottle with the energy content of a can of Monster and stashing them beside my bed and downing one every morning. But that might not be the greatest idea, and so I'm asking all of you for help.

How do you wake up every morning?