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Agggghhhh the pain and anguish. Why didn't I backup all my data before? They say hindsight is 20/20... I'd like to add that it's quite expensive and painful, too. I picked up a Western Digital automatic backup dive (paid too much at Futureshop) and will still be waiting up to 14 days (they said up to but I'm betting they meant "at least").
I will never advise another to go somewhere which I don't have complete trust in. That's why I can say with confidently that if any of you are looking for some computer related thingamajiggy then this is the place to go. NCIX has gotten me parts that were near impossible to find (odd cables for example). And though I am currently tied into Futureshop's Service Plan (not worth it in time or cost) I will be buying my next computer from NCIX. You can click below to see what I mean about deals.

Crash Update: Hooray for Opera!

So here I am having to adjust to the old 233Mhz PII with 32mb ram Dell and a whopping 3gb drive... since I did a fresh install of Win98 (have yet to find a linux flavour that runs well on such poor specs) I started to look for some new things to play with. First stop was Mozilla for Firefox. Those Firefox fanboys can be so loud that I thought there might actually be something to it. After downloading I started looking for ways to speed it up (Fasterfox plugin), maximize browser space (new theme), do mouse gestures (another plugin), and have the BlogThis button (yet another plugin). Then I had to restart and could really start playing with it. Initial impressions: meh.
Net install: Thunderbird. I mean, It's got to be at least as good as Outlook Express. Got it installed and, yup, it's as good as Outlook Express... but no better. Impression: meh.
So then I think, Opera is free now... I can go get Opera 8.0 and have both email and browsing in one app. My only fear is that it would be too slow. Got it freshly installed and imported all the prefs from Thunderbird. No problems. No issues. Looks good. Tabs automatically. Didn't have to install plugins to do all these things (except the BlogThis Button). And it is indeed faster.
Impression: Rawks!

So here's to Opera. I know you don't do everything (mlxchange and point2agent but neither did Mozilla and I can keep IE around for those tasks) but I forgive you for all the joy an happiness you bring. I sound like such a geek.

Now if I can find a decent WYSIWYG editor to replace my downed Dreamweaver... Need to work on some templates which will work with Joomla.

Terrible! Horrible! Catastrophic Crash!

Aggggghhhhh Hindsight may be 20-20 but foresight is all the sweeter... which makes ignoring that common-sense incredibly, regrettably, bitter. That's right, my 18 month old Toshiba notebook has suffered a mechanical hard drive failure and will be out of comission for up to 4 weeks. I may have lost so much. Digital photos, email, writings, real estate deals (copys), music. Etc. I had to pull out the old but trusty Dell Inspiron 3200 (circa 1999) with the Intel Pentium II 233 and a whopping 32mb of ram.
This old Dell is a work horse. Solid as a brick. It's too bad the new ones (I checked them out) don't have the same build quality