And We're Back

So, Matt and I have had a couple of weeks where things just weren't really going all that smoothly. Matt had a few days where he'd lost his wedding ring after a jog and lost his wallet somewhere between work and home, and a few frustrating days at work. He found his ring (he'd put it in a random drawer before going on a jog/swimming) and his wallet (it had fallen out of his bag outside the hospital and a good samaritan turned it in, money and all), and the work stuff blew over (lame boss at an outside hospital Matt was rotating at for the month). Then I had a day where the computer just stopped working, the vacuum stopped working while I was using it, and then Luke got a bloody, fat lip when he face planted on our floor - all while Matt's working crazy long days during this rotation. Luke's lip healed, the vacuum magically started working again (I think it had over heated - I was doing some serious cleaning; moving the couches and all). But, the computer decided not to work. I called one of my electrical engineer brothers. Basically, our hard drive died. This was 2 weeks ago. Next decision: buy a new computer or try and save money and hope putting in a new hard drive ourselves works. We went the less expensive route.
The pain about a new hard drive is that you are starting completely from scratch - no operating system, processors, drivers, or programs - NOTHING. We had to reinstall everything and slowly discover what we needed to find and download. We reinstalled windows. Got the basics going. Then we tried to get online - we had no local area network driver on the hard drive. That took us a few days to get figured out. finally we hooked up our wireless card to the desktop and got online that way and downloaded a driver. Finally we have internet again. But no sound. We've spent the last few days trying to figure out how to get sound. A computer is pretty sad with no sound, no music. We drove to a specialty computer store to buy a sound card today. Stuck that to the mother board and put the installation disk in. It wouldn't work and kept causing the computer to freeze up. So Matt took it out. He was getting a few things at Walmart tonight and decided to check out their sound cards. He came home and installed it and we have sound again! Thank you Walmart! You never let us down!
So - we think we're pretty much up and running again. We have a lot of programs to reinstall on the computer, but we're in pretty good shape for now.
Thank goodness for our external hard drive which backed up all our files every night. Our pictures and music are safe and we don't have to spend $200+ to try and retrieve them from our broken hard drive.
Anywho - this post has been much more longwinded than I was planning. Computer's been driving me nuts the past few weeks, but I think we're back. Picture posts might take me a few days because I need to trust my computer again, but hopefully they'll be posted soon.