Thanks for all your responses.

Yes, I'm sure we've all had similar experiences.
Talk about an external drive.....
When I picked up my computer from my repair guy, on the way home I stopped at CompUSA and bought an external drive. It's funny...
John_C, who is not with us anymore, told me to do just that about 2 months ago and of course I never got around to it. If I had, well...
I don't think having Ghost Image would have mattered because like I said, my second hard drive was a mirror of my main drive and when my motherboard went it literally destroyed my mirror drive. Unless I'm wrong about that.

Bill...I won't be using my laptop on the internet, just for my gigs, and only one maybe two programs. I'm glad you mentioned backing the laptop on the external drive too. I didn't think of that.

Again, that's for all you caring responses.

Peter