If you read my ramblings on facebook or twitter you may already know that my not-so-trusty-of-late laptop is now simply a late laptop.

It had been slowing down, stalling and generally misbehaving for quite some months now, getting crankier and more crotchety with each passing week.

But the other day it decided to throw all it’s toys definitively out of it’s pram and now refuses point blank to get past it’s start-up screen.

I have tried threatening and cajoling, shouting and, I’ll admit, crying – all to no avail.

I use my laptop all the time.

It has, therefore, been most upsetting.

Machines come and go. They work, and then they don’t. They’re useful, and then, suddenly, they’re not.

They get old and fail, like the best of us.

But this particular evil machine has, in it’s innards, all of my photographs from the last several years. Which is by far what I’m most bothered about.

To add insult to injury, I had bought a gadget to back everything up, just in case… but I hadn’t actually done the backing up thing when my machine died.

Plus, yet another annoyance, I had also just uploaded the results of a marathon photo session of my necklaces, the results of which were destined for my shop.

I deleted everything from the camera after uploading, so the results of all that effort are now lost and must be done again.

I did get a few replacement necklace photos done after returning from our walk yesterday, as we got home just before the sun dipped below the horizon.

So I will be updating the shop shortly.

I’m taking the laptop to the menders today.

Not because I expect them to be able to fix the damn thing, but in the quite possibly forlorn hope that they might just be able to extract some of my photographic and other booty from it.

Wish me luck. ♥

update!

The very nice people at KRCS in Nottingham are extracting my files and transferring them to my new laptop (a very generous birthday gift from my partner!) as we speak, so I should be back to normal in a couple of days or so.

Thrilled to bits doesn’t begin to describe it.

updated update!

The files were corrupted. No recovery possible. Please back up your computer now, if you know what’s good for you! 🙁 ♥