CRASH!

Well, one of my biggest fears has just come true. My computer completely crashed. And when I say crashed I mean it. I lost EVERYTHING!! Apparently windows did an automatic update when I last shut off my computer and one of those lovely updates contained a virus that infiltrated and shut the whole computer down. It would not boot, and I couldn't even get into the computer. A friend of mine suggested a couple of things which did not work. I can't get it to boot, so there's not much to do. I would turn it on and the screen would simply go blue and have a looooong error report, but it would not open windows. All of this was on the DOS screen. So I got out my handy dandy laptop (thank heavens we have one) and did an internet search of the error. A bonus: I found multiple helps for the problems, but none of them worked. Finally I found a solution. The only thing to do is to upload windows onto the computer again. The problem with this is any information that you previously had stored on your hard drive would be gone, including any programs that you once had. Every program on my computer is gone...including the ones that run the sound card and mother board. Basically I have a computer with nothing on it that runs, and thus doesn't work. I searched and found the huge box of discs that I've kept all these years (good thing I did) of useless discs that you would never think you would ever need to use again. Most of them, I didn't even know what they were for. But I put them in one by one and slowly things started working again. The problem: my disc that contains the windows program is sooo old that it's like working with a stone age computer. Not to mention it's not compatible with any of my other external devices, including my monitor and printer. Several years ago, about 8 in fact, we had a friend of ours fix our computer, where he took everything off that didn't work and replaced it with new stuff and then kept everything that did work. It was a great deal for us, but he installed windows from his own home and so we don't actually have the disc or program in our hands. The biggest bummer of all -- I lost all of my pictures and home videos. I freaked out for a moment and then realized we had a back up hard drive where we saved all of them, just in case. And luckily our back up hard drive came out unscathed and all of these precious memories are there. Except that I've been slacking in my diligence of backing photos up and so I've lost everything since May 2011. I am heart broken since this is the majority of little Landon's life -- gone. I have felt for months and months that I needed to get the pictures backed up and on discs or flash drives or something but have kept putting it off. But now it's too late. The only pictures I have of those months are here on my blog. It's like losing them in a fire because I can never get them back. I have shed tears of frustration at my own stupidity and have for sure learned my lesson. All pictures will immediately be backed up when I load them onto my computer. So take a page out of my book and go back up all your important documents. Needless to say, I won't be sharing any pictures with you for a while, until I can afford to go buy a newer version of windows, which may not be any time soon. Sigh, what a terrible week this has been.