My laptop decided to crash on me for the first time ever. It's a Toshiba Satellite A505. Has all the bells and whistles, and WIN 7.

Long story short, because of the annoying backup utility, I was able to recover everything on my laptop, except that in the process, I decided to upgrade to WIN7 Ultimate, so I could run XP programs that I have lying around.

Lesson learned for me. I was always putting off the backup for later because it's a RAM hog. Now, I always let it do its thing. I would have lost a lot of stuff. Not just my runtime, but a whole slew of other things: a thousand plus pictures of my kids growing up over the last 10 years, nearly 500GB of music, all the renders and short animations that I have done trying to learn Poser, background pics and other textures and maps. There was a lot of stuff on this laptop. I would have been decimated if I lost it all.

Always backup your files. I am sure glad that I did.

And make a recovery disc...

If I had a nickle for ever time a woman told me to get lost, I could buy Manhattan.