That sucking sound ...

That sucking sound you hear is Jen's hard drive imploding under its own mass. Around noon it died, and bad us, we haven't backed it up in a long time. I have a backup set of DVDs labeled May 2003...

So, the question, in addition to what to do about the data loss, is what to do about her computer. We took the kids to Fry's this afternoon so Jen could mull that over and browse laptops. We were planning on getting her a laptop after the tax refund in April, but after some deliberating we decided to go ahead and do that now. The advantage is not sinking $$ into a machine that is slated for replacement in 5 months. So, a few moments ago, we ordered her shiny new iBook 12.

As for the drive, we have found a few places that will recover it for an arm and a leg. We're going to try Gillware because they will analyze the disk for free and charge nothing if they can't recover. We're not sure yet how much farther we are prepared to go with this. Most of the digital pictures and such are already on the web server, which is backed up. A lot of her PowerPoint documents and spreadsheets are not. So, hopefully, we can get them back.