Computers are evil.

I know, I'm not the first to say, nor will I be the last, but I'm saying it anyway. It's been a bad week. And I feel like complaining about it here. So there.

Finally, on Monday I get up the motivation to sit down and revise my novel. I had some new scenes to write to add in. Okay, I had the general idea worked out in my head, so on Monday I got 2 scenes done (1500 words). Yay! Then on Tuesday I tweaked an already present scene. I saved after that. Then my computer froze up.

Okay, the laptop has done this before. All I usually had to do was reboot (it freezes so I can't even use Ctl Alt Dlt), and the stuff that I hadn't saved is the stuff usually missing from the document (which usually isn't much since I'm constantly saving), and this time I had saved right before it froze up.

So, I restart and try to open my document. It asks to convert (this is WordPerfect btw). Huh? It shouldn't need to be converted, I was opening it in the program I created it in. Well, turns out my entire 70 page document is no longer accesible, and even trying to open it in notepad, there's nothing there, it's just blank.

I had really like those new scenes.

Tears squeezing out of my eyes, a panic attach setting in. This was no good. What, when I finally get 2500 words revised (when it took me so long to get the motivation to revise), this happens? Do the gods enjoy playing jokes on me?

I still can't get to my lost scenes. A margarita on Tuesday night made things a little better for a while. And a two-day separation from my computer (I took the laptop into Best Buy for diagnostic tests).

Well, they think it was the spyware on my computer. Me, I expect the sucker to freeze up on me even after I reboot the entire system, reinstall everything, and take extra precautions to shield against the spyware (and guess how often I connected that computer to the internet? maybe once every three months - and it had over 1400 traces of spyware on it! you tell me how that works).

Anyway, today I dropped the money on a JumpDrive, and I intend to back up every hour now. I only lost the stuff that I wrote on Mon and Tue because the rest was in another file. I'm also going to upgrade to WordPerfect 12 because even though they said it wasn't a hardware or software problem, I have sense that it might have been a combination of WordPerfect and my laptop over-heating. We intend to reboot our desktop comp too. So for both comps we're buying Norton System Works and Firewall (AntiVirus is included with that, but we already had that). Since I need Microsoft Word because almost everyone (including the school I'm attending) mostly uses that, and since when I installed Microsoft Office before it was from the college I no longer work at (the had the diskas to check out for their staff and students for free), we needed to purchase Word at least. there was no way in hell we were going to get the new Office for $400, although I probably could have bought the upgraded version for $240 since the desktop at least came with Microsoft Suite 2001. $240 was still too much (hell, that's how much I'm getting in a week on unemployment). So, we decided to drop $90 instead for an upgraded version of Microsoft Suite.

So, $350 later (and thankfully the diagnostic tests were free since I had the laptop under the service plan at Best Buy), I hate computers more than ever.

Oh, and I still don't know when I'll get the courage to re-write those scenes without getting all choked up at how beautiful they were and that I'll never be able to get it that way again. Five hours worth of work down the drain.

One of my friends had her car stolen the same day. I swear, the universe burped and we got the stinky fumes. *grumbles*

Not to mention, I've been wating the rest of the week screwing around with computer crap when I have better things to do!

I just hope the computer doesn't eat this post because I sure don't want to type it again...