I have a couple extra notebook sized hard drives laying around on NAKIA so I put one in, installed Windows from the recovery CD and began the long process of getting all the applications loaded again. Man what a process.
We have a back up from November so our data was just out of date, not completely lost. The one thing that was really bad was that our back up from Quicken was a week or two old, which meant all our tracked expenses for that time were lost. In an effort to recover that, I bought some recovery software online and put the crashed hard disk into an external USB case. The recovery software (Data Doctor Recovery) was expensive but worked as advertised and I was able to recover all our Quicken data and all the pictures we'd taken since the November backup. Whew!
The one saving grace in all this was that this year I decided to do my taxes online at TurboTax.com instead of downloading the software and doing them on the computer. As a result, I didn't loose any of my yet-to-be-filed tax data. Yeah!
Now, everyone repeat after me: "I resolve to backup my valuable data every month!"
John