Last night, I maxed out my credit card and bought one of these:
Dropped the other two computers off with The Geek Squad to see if they can do any data recovery.
Gateway told me that Blue Screen of Death + Clicking Sound + inability to restart past the “Gateway” symbol page meant my hard drive was truly fucked. The other computer has a dead screen and is perpetually restarting, and after dropping $317 useless dollars on “fixing” the Gateway only to have it explode two hours later, I wasn’t dropping another $500 on the other computer only to see it, too, die in some horrible way as soon as it got back home.
For the same amount of money ($700 +), I could buy a whole new system (This was $999. I paid the extra $200 cause this had a more comfortable keyboard than the one for $749. Since I spend anywhere from 4-12 hours a day typing on my laptop, comfortable keyboard was priority 1, followed immediately by how good the screen was).
So now I’ve got a new baby and a 3-year warranty. And I’m getting myself a back-up data storage service or an external hard drive, because this ordeal has been massively ridiculous.
Sometimes I have to learn my lessons the hard way.
Back to work.