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.