On the heels of the near life experience: another recovery on my computer. It wouldn't finish booting up past the blue Windows XP screen this morning, and I ran all sorts of scans on it, tried starting it in safe mode. . . .

Nada.

Spent hours back and forth on the phone with HP, running more scans, opening up my tower and poking around in the dust and gadget guts.

Only, twelve hours later, to have to do a recovery, anyway. This time, I didn't back up my data at BestBuy. I'd stopped saving stuff to my hard drive that I wasn't prepared to lose. Everything else went in various email accounts. and I just installed Mozy, (www.mozy.com) which'll automatically backup MY Documents ever Sunday.

Turns out the culprit this time? Microsoft. Apparently HP/Compaq computers are persnickety about downloads, and when I get updates for any software, I should get them directly off the HP website. Microsoft notified me about an update for Media Player, and, stupid me, I installed it. That was Friday night. Today, I spent all afternoon and most of the evening fighting with my computer, then running the recovery and reinstalling all my programs.

And trying to remember my favorites once my internet connection was back up.

Eventually I'm going to have to re-rip my cds. Again. All three thousand some odd songs, at least half of them mizes made by friends, and thus not labeled. . . .

But at least it's not my hard drive, like some of the HP reps thought. I'm trying to be thankful for not-so-small favors. I've got all my anti-virus stuff and firewall stuff up and running, not to mention two ways to back up all my crap. And I've learned more about my computer in a day of agonizing about it and trying to fix it, than I have in the years since I got it.

And now, I'm going to bed.