PSA: Dead computer is going to slow us down a bit

[jducoeur]

Birka was rather pleasant: good enough to make me forget that right *before* Birka (like, as we were on our way out the door), our desktop computer went *boom*. Windows insisted on updating; msmemory allowed it to do so; and when it finished rebooting, it came back with an error to the effect of "/windows/system/stuff corrupted; please run PC recovery". (Have I ever mentioned how much I hate Windows? Take it as read.)

So we are a bit hosed at the moment. We both have our laptops, but a lot of day-to-day stuff -- in particular, our websites and our main email -- mostly get run through the desktop machine, so things are going to run slowly or be delayed until I've rebuilt that. I believe that PC recovery will, in fact, get the machine working again, but at the cost of deleting all our programs and forcing us to reinstall everything from scratch, which is likely to take all week. (We run a lot on that machine, and it's already a busy week.)

So step one is figuring out how to back up the hard drive. (Since I do not necessarily trust PC Recovery not to lose *any* of the data.) My guess is that I need to get some kind of disk enclosure that will let me hook the drive up to one of the laptops, and back it up to a portable drive. Bleah -- comes a little too close to having to deal with hardware for my tastes. If anyone can point me at exactly what I need to buy from Microcenter, it would be appreciated...