Thanks to everyone for your concern and queries 'bout me and my poor ol' 'puter... First off things are going far better than I'd anticipated... I guess a little planning ahead actually does pay off once in a while...
I've been able to recover most every thing thanks to having a fairly recent backup... Of course you always end up losing some stuff - it's just unavoidable I guess... But the important stuff (including our 8,000+ music file collection) made it thru intact...
As for what went wrong? Well, let me say to begin with the 'puter in question was a 10+ year old (first hint) E-Machine (second hint) that I'd gotten for my Mother to putter with... OK, it was a weak moment (E-Machine), but times were tough and money was short and...
The problem seemed to be partly hardware (strange little errors popping up with the HD) and partly software... I probably could have attempted to resurrect her one last time with a recut of the HD, but that would've meant going thru every thing I'm going thru now and, then, still ending up with an antique that would be good mostly for email and such like that there...
So, having acquired the Toshia laptop a while back at very little expense (it's a long story, but let me just say that every once in a great while you can manage to come out ahead of the game when playing with the corporate world by their rules) I figured it'd be better to go for the gusto...
Still have some stuff I'm going to try to recover from the ol' girl tomorrow - like all my browser faves and some email and addys... We'll
see...
