I did almost pull an all nighter with restoring my laptop. The good news is that it does not appear to be a true HDD failure, but rather a very extreme OS corruption. I had to hand reload everything, which kept me up to the wee hours. What fun! No wonder people are willing to pay to have somebody like me feed CDs to their machine.

The key was that all my critical data was backed up twice. I have a nice system using XP Offline Folders on my laptop to keep a local replica of nearly everything I have on my desktop, where the data truly lives. Then I have a Ximeta NetDisk attached to my network, and I back up everything from my desktop to it on a scheduled basis. Pretty nifty! The only other thing slicker is one of those Mirra boxes, which I’ve set up for a couple customers. Those work really well, once they took care of a couple early bugs.

I took my wife to a nearby Apple Store today, and as I predicted, she fell in love with the iMac. It will be several months until we have cash to buy one, but it’s not like the price will go up. Who knows, maybe there will be a price drop by Spring!

So, it’s off to my next misadventure.