Laptop Issues

I recently stared having problems with my laptop.  The week after Sarah got home from Spring Break and back to actually doing school work, she asked if she could use my laptop.  Her school one apparently kept crashing (so glad we paid the technology fee for that piece of crap).  About a day or so later, I started getting the same sort of problems with my laptop, i.e. the dreaded Microsoft "blue screen of death".  I would just shut down and restart and then it would crash again 10-15 minutes later.  I initially thought that it had something to do with the school website since Sarah's school laptop was doing the same thing.

I did a little digging around online and found a suggestion that recommended doing a system restore, which I decided to try.  When I did it, a window popped up that said there were errors, or damage.  Basically something that needed repair.  So I ran that option, which took about 8 hours, and then restored the laptop to approximately a week earlier.  

It then ran great for about the next week or so.  Then Kris used it to do a presentation for work.  When she got home and plugged it in, it wouldn't boot up and just kept making beeps.  Not good.  I waited a day or two while I tried to research online what the problem might be.  After a couple of days with no luck in getting it to reboot, I called a guy.  I had used him previously when I had a crash that I couldn't recover from a couple of years ago, so I figured whatever was wrong was over my level of expertise and it was probably time for a professional to have a look.

I told him what was wrong and he took it with him to, I assume, hook it up to whatever equipment he needs and run whatever tests that will tell him what is wrong with it.  Then I get the call.  Apparently the motherboard is bad and really is not feasible to repair.  The good news, however, is that the hard drive is recoverable.  I didn't have a whole lot left on it, because after the first few crashes I started moving data (pictures, home movies, important files, etc.) onto flash drives, just in case there was something seriously wrong.  So now I had the computer guy just move the data over to an external hard drive.  So now I get to start shopping for a new laptop.  This time I am going to take my time and figure out exactly what I need in terms of memory, processor, etc.  And I may just move all the pictures I have onto that external drive since I'll have almost 1TB of free space on it to use once that data is moved back to the new laptop, if I decide to move it back at all.