heh, I almost had you there. But seriously, here is a very long story below:

My computer died last night, it was very sad. At approximately 10:40PM, while reading email, my computer suffered some sort of nerve damage and went crazy. Firefox went full screen, and random numbers and letters flooded my email box. I thought I was hacked.

"Impossible!" I thought, as I scrambled to hit the kill switch. "My security is enough to keep out a blackhat!" (and no, its probably not)

Flipping the switch, the power went dead as the dimmed lights in my room flickered. Gaining my confidence, I blamed it on a bug in Gran Paradiso, the Firefox 3.0 alpha I recently installed. But as I powered up the computer, I learned it was a much much worse than a simple program bug.

My computer started clicking. I mean, like the sound a harddrive makes when all hell breaks loose. I start panicing, and immediately hit the switch again.

"Oh ****" I mumble, as a I hoped that my main HD wasnt dead. If it was, then the last 2 months of code go with it. (no, I dont use SVN). As I looked into the computer, I saw no bumping fans. I unplugged my speakers and one harddrive and tried again (i wasnt sure which one). Clicking continued.

I unplugged the second hard drive....

clicking continued. I sighed in relief, my data was probably still there. But then I realized that it would have been better if it was a hard drive than a motherboard or processor problem. This was because I uploaded half my code to the backup server a half an hour before, and I happen to be quite poor (no job). If I lost a hard drive, even my main one, I can pull one out of my other... 3 computers laying around. If I lose my processor/motherboard, I would have to revert to a 1 ghz iBook running ubuntu which I have to return to my job in a month, or my 600mhz batterieless, cd rom less, floppyless, ethernet less, HP laptop which I got for a very good price many years ago.

I frantically began pulling out my PCI cards (much like that computer guy in Goldeneye), until I only had my video, RAM, and processor. Keyboard and mouse were still plugged in. I flipped the switch.

Click, Click, Click... Clickity, Clickity, Click.

"Noooooooooo" bad news for me.

At this point in time, It was already 11 PM, and I spent the whole day writing even more essays, and the night before I only got 5 hours of sleep. And to top it off, my room was around 80-85 degrees due to it being the damn summer, and the air conditioner not being on. And im on the top story.

I leave it, and decide my sleep is worth more. I pull out my Zune, to listen to the radio. Like a gift, the radio station just began playing the whole new Linkin Park CD from start to finish, two days before release! I was ecstatic. Great CD, btw.

--

anyway, to make a long story short, I spilled a water/sprite mixture (I like sprite very cold, thus lots of ice) on my keyboard a half an hour before this incident. I pulled the keys out, and dried it, and it seemed to work fine. I forgot the incident.

Little did I know, that a half an hour later, the water seeped into the circuit board. Thus, firefox going crazy, and lots of weird text. In the morning, it dried, so when I turned on my computer half awake, it didn't click. At all.

So it seems like the keyboard was sending crazy signals to the motherboard, which was reading them as "oh no, send kill!" Once it dried, no more kill, no more click.

Anyway, the moral of the story is to not be poor, backup your files, and dont place a glass of ice/sprite on top of a pile of papers ontop of your xbox, which is on your desk next to your keyboard. Bad things could happen.

I just knew reading your post that your HD and bit its last byte.

I keep absolutely every working document of mine organized neatly in one grand set of folders and, every couple days during a semester or every week otherwise, carry out the simple task of right clicking, Add to Archive, typing in Document Backup xx-xx-xx, make sure it's set to 'Best', 'Add Recovery Record' (5%), and 'Test Archive', go read a few emails or play some EVE, come back, and then copy ther resultant Backup of Life to every hard-drive I have access to -- and once a month, I remove the pictures from the archive and stick it on a USB key, which goes in to the safe in the closet (when I say it's got documents, that includes important ones).

Why? Cause I've been screwed in much the same way you thought you were.

I've only had to invoke a backup once, but it was a life-saver. There are probably much more elaborate or secure methods of getting it done, but good ol' WinRAR hasn't let me down so far...

Source control FTW!

but he did appear to die...that's all that matters....

jk Nem

About that Linkin Park CD too, I've been listening to it for a few weeks and, though I try, I just can't seem to like it. I don't know, maybe it's because I've been really into metal lately.

All That Remains, Trivium, God Forbid, Atreyu, and Opeth FTW!!

LOL i didnt, i was to lazy to bother putting tags around them so i just put normal qoutation marks rather then use the tags

Regards Wolfe

I'm sure GeekSquad guys know what they're doing well enough, just saying it's nothing the traditional geek friend can't do.

Though, that friend of yours, first thing I'd of done is kicked them. WTF kind of nasty pr0n were they looking at to get +7k virii?! Then I'd of taken aforementioned pr0n "for safe keeping and careful analysis." Then kick them again for not having an AV in use like NOD32 that inspects in-bound web traffic before letting the rest of the OS have the data.