So this morning I woke up to find that my shiny new little laptop, the one I have been so lovingly configuring for a week and a half now…is totally and completely dead. It won’t even start up.
I’m pretty upset about it. Thank goodness I hadn’t really done too much writing on there, so not too much data is lost. The worst loss is my DietPower data, not to mention the program itself which was a real bugger to install on Vista.
On the plus side, I have my very own in-house IT guy and I’m sure he will help me take care of it on the weekend, when we return to the Future Shop to do mucho yelling. They better not give us any crap over this.
TurtleHead 
Well, dead doesn’t necessarily mean your data, or even your config, is lost. It could be a hardware problem.
Having said that, I hope this will inspire you to nag your “in-house IT guy” to set up some kind of regular backup solution (if he hasn’t done so already). It sounds like you intend to save a lot of stuff that you would dearly regret losing. Remember — if you’re not backing up your data, you’re basically sitting on a time bomb.
We had a great backup setup on our old machine — we had a double hard drive and it copied our data from the main drive to the backup every night. just hadn’t set up anything for our new desktop or for the laptop yet. He’s on it now, though. I’m a lucky girl indeed!
Just make sure you occasionally back things up offsite. Backing up on the same hard drive is pointless, obviously; I hope your “double hard drive” wasn’t just two partitions on the same drive. Backing up to another drive on the same machine is good, but if you have a fire your data will still be toast.