Computer Woes Resolved

So my flight just left from Tucson en route to Chicago (to Brussels, to Abidjan, to Monrovia). It has definitely been a busy couple of days trying to deal with a major computer crisis, packing, saying goodbye to friends and family and preparing myself mentally for another extended period of time in West Africa with a whole new set of cultural norms to adjust to. Definitely the biggest stress of the last week was my computer being destroyed by a virus.

I mentioned in the previous post what happened to my computer and what my intended solution was (backup and reformat the hard drive from scratch). Well, after buying an external optical drive and obtaining the necessary XP install disks I discovered that my laptop wasn't able to reformat itself using the normal method because (I suspect) its small size makes the hard drive unable to deal with booting and reinstalling the OS from a USB connected optical drive. Thus, on Thursday night I gave up on the computer even though I knew it was fixable - just not in a time frame that would have allowed me to bring it along to Liberia (which is the sole purpose for the laptop existing). Luckily when I told my dad about this that night at my goodbye carne asada dinner, he proposed (or maybe I suggested and he accepted) that he fix and keep that computer as his own and in exchange he would cover the cost of replacing it as payment. This is how I ended up going to Best Buy with less than 24 hours until my flight and buying my laptop's identical twin (well, except this one is blue and the old one was brown....and this one came with Windows 7 instead of XP). The final battle was shoving my near 100GB of data onto the new computer before I needed to leave for the airport (I succeeded with a couple of hours to spare thanks to the help of some friends). I'm actually still working on it since I decided it would be best to use my iPod as the backup drive for my music - I'm currently using SharePod to copy all the music on my iPod onto my new computer while typing this post on my flight.

As for installing all my software (antivirus, firefox, sharepod, video converter, trillian, itunes, skype, media player, etc), I took care of all this while waiting for my Chicago flight at the airport. Now that I'm away from internet, but will still be able to recharge the battery in Chicago, I'm going to spend this entire flight trying to organize my files and brainstorm what else I could possibly need to do while I still have access to internet with this computer (I'm working under the assumption that wireless internet won't be an option for a month or more (possibly eight?) upon my arrival in Liberia).