As a general note

The words "Operating system not found" are some damned scary words to see on your computer screen when you haven't been diligent at all about making backups.

Here therefore are public thanks to the Gods of Computing that I was in fact able to get back into my hard drive and get years' worth of my personal data copied onto one of spazzkat's systems, because I would have been pretty damned upset if I had lost my writing. The roleplay logs I could live without, but my writing would be much more difficult to replace.

We'll be burning that data off the other system to CD tomorrow.