My computer died

So last week my computer died. Apparently I got a virus. Don't ask me how or when or from where. I don't remember downloading or opening anything I shouldn't have. It was fading on me about 2 weeks ago. I got nervous and updated my virus software, it scanned, and everything seemed to be going ok.

False sense of security.

A week ago, Thursday, I got the true black-screen-of-death. Not to be confused with the blue-screen-of-death. This was soooo much worse. If you get the blue-screen-of-death your computer is just mostly-dead...and the only thing left to do is go through his pockets and look for loose change....heheheheh

*sorry couldn't resist*

Anyway, back to my story, the black screen means NOTHING is happening. It means your computer is GONE, it's not even trying to start itself.

I didn't panic. I just picked up the phone and put out the call to my own personal Geek Squad...otherwise known as my brothers. My first brother says "don't bother taking it to anyone, they just charge you as much as it would cost to buy a new computer and all they'll do is reformat your hard drive" -- good bit of advice for all of you out there -- "just say goodbye to anything you had on your computer and reformat your hard-drive".

Good advice, but how do you reformat a hard drive??? This lead me to calling my second brother (he's actually the 3rd in line of 4), and I pleaded for help. Saturday my brother spent 6 hours with me helping reformat my hard-drive, upgrading my memory, reinstalling my operating system, and installing protection software.

Man do I owe him BIG TIME!

So you're probably asking, "Well what about all that stuff on your computer? Aren't you just sick that you lost it all?!?!?". I'm not and I'll tell you why...For the past 2 years I've been working off of an external hard-drive I got from Costco for about $80, and transferred all of my files to it. I save EVERYTHING to that hard drive. At the first sign of problems 2 weeks ago, I unattached it. Everything on it is safe and sound. The only true casualties to this debacle were my bookmarks for my browser and my iTunes music. iTunes will let me access/download all the music I have purchased from them. However, I've lost all the music from CD's that I had uploaded. I went from over a 1,000 songs to about 200. Fortunately, all the music is still on my iPod and seems to be permanently there.

I figure I got off lucky. The moral of this story -- BACK-UP, BACK-UP, BACK-UP and invest in an external hard-drive.