How I've spent the last 3 days

I've been absent from the blogging world for the past few days and you all probably thought I had my head buried in tax returns.  I wish.  Just for the record, you will NEVER hear me wishing to be working on tax returns unless I'm doing something far, far, worse...which I was. 

After my lovely quilting day on Sunday, I traveled, with a spring in my step (not really - let's keep it real here, folks), across the house to my home office, ready to get to work for the week.  At the time I had in excess of 20 tax returns in for preparation, plus 1099's to prepare, and I needed to get back to work on them.  More returns have come in this week.  The short version of Monday's events is that I spent the entire day trying to get this lovely piece of equipment back to a quality of life that was acceptable to us both.

Unfortunately, by 5 p.m., it was apparent that it was not to be.  I was in a bit of a panic at that point as this is tax season after all, and that computer is how I connect to the server to do my work.  Fortunately, data loss was a non-issue as I have both an on-line backup as well as an external hard drive, but the operating system was clearly not going to function properly without repair.  The computer is 5 1/2 years old, so the best course of action at this point was to completely replace it with something reliable for tax season and worry about fixing it later.

So, yesterday afternoon, I picked up this lovely piece of equipment.  It's a Dell Studio XPS 8100 with an Intel i7 processor, 8 GB of RAM, a 1 TB hard drive and souped up graphics to handle the multiple monitors I use.  I really like it so far and it runs so quietly that I have to put my ear right next to it to even hear that it's on.

I spent last evening getting software installed and today it has been restoring my data.  I had planned to have the data restored overnight while I was sleeping, but unbeknownst to me, the computer was set to go to sleep after 2 hours of non-activity, not including internet transmission, so it went to sleep not long after I did!  It has been restoring all day and is almost done.  I've tested some of the restored data and it is perfect, but the real test will be when I try to open the email files.  Fingers crossed that they will all be there.  I'm off now to get the printers installed.  If that goes well, and email is fine, I'm hoping to be back in almost full action by tomorrow.  I am still trying to get one program installed, but I have a work around I can use if I can't get it going.  Lost productivity at this time of year is not a good thing and I think there will be some long days ahead to catch up.  BUT, no data loss is the most important thing, and that's all that really matters to me at this point.