So it’s been a while since we posted, mainly because we’ve been busy and also because Sandra usually posts from her laptop which had a bad hard drive, and I have set a deadline for myself on a project I’m working on of the end of the month. But I wanted to give the good news that Sandra’s laptop is not only working again, but it went from an 80GB drive to a 200GB drive which is almost as big as one of our external back-up drives!
But here’s the thing I learned in this process. My drive went down a few months ago, but it was over 3 years old and I tend to work my machine pretty hard. I sent my computer off to Apple to get the drive replaced with a factory approved replacement 80GB drive and the whole process cost me about $300 and four days of waiting. Sandra’s drive went out and we spent $180 on a new 200GB drive that I replaced myself after waiting four days for it to come in from TigerDirect.com and I had all of her software re-installed and re-registered in about 4 hours. So for about $100 less I could have had a killer upgrade to my machine as well!
So keep that in mind, sometimes it’s easier and cheaper to do your own repairs on your computer and if you’ve ever played with Legos you will probably do a good job replacing the parts in your computer.
As for her old drive… we have been quoted $1100 to send it off to a clean room to have the data recovered. So the Gatlinburg photos that are posted on this blog are probably the only ones you are ever going to see. I’ve promised Sandra that I would take her back to Gatlinburg where we could repeat the vacation for $1100 and I’m sure the dogs wouldn’t mind either.