My laptop borked at AC, a bad sector in on the hard drive. Thanks to a lot of amazing help from  furian and having paid for the full warranty from Dell, things are mostly back to normal, and no data was lost.

In the meantime, for the last 2 weeks, I was on an old XP laptop. Old Illustrator, wouldn't see my CS4 files properly. Didn't have all my working files onboard and it wouldn't talk to the 3T external with all the files. It wouldn't talk to the laser printer, had to dig out the old inkjet, which had it's own problems. I had to set up the old laptop on my work table, next to my desk, along with the external drive it couldn't read, so half my workspace was gone. Had all sorts of extra cables and power cords, added an additional power strip. Had to dig out an old physical network cable, and figure out where I put the network hub I haven't used in years. There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza....

I could function, but everything took 6 times as long, and every step was plagued by some form of not going smoothly. About 3 days ago I threw my hands up and said Eff it. It can all just wait until I have my current laptop back in working order.

Yesterday the Dell tech came over and swapped out the hard drive (yes, Dell makes house calls, worth every penny) and then Furian copied a clone from the old drive onto the new drive. This morning I got it all set up again, and it's like nothing ever happened. A giant load of stress has melted away.

I still have a backlog of orders to fill, including the commissions from AC. But now I can actually do them and not have it take forever, and not leave me with a giant stress headache.

As one last insult to the whole thing, I went to shut off my old laptop and it notified me that it was now installing update 1 of 155. Why???? It's an XP machine. Why is it even bothering with updates? Two hours later and it's at 124. Bleh.