The School of Hard Drives

About a week ago the hard drive in my Dell laptop failed. It wasn't too hard to get a replacement sent to me because my system was still under warranty. The DHL driver left the box on my doorstep yesterday. Yes it was over 100 degrees out when this was done and my door is about 10 feet from the pool area which was being heavily used when I arrived home yesterday. I am very grateful for my honest neighbors. This was just the beginning of the fun. One included CD reinstalled some version of Windows XP. Not bad in sense because all of the junk bundled software is no longer on my computer. But this also means I had to reinstall a lot of drivers that were not included on any of the CDs though all of the junk bundled software was included. Among the missing drivers were those for the onboard wireless card and modem. How am I supposed to download drivers to make my internet connecting devices work when I am unable to connect to the internet because I don't have drivers installed? That's enough to make my head spin. Thankfully I kept the wireless card Wayne donated to me some years ago (thanks Wayne!) so I was able to get this task completed. The lesson I learned is not only should I keep backups of my files (did that!) I should also keep a copy of the drivers I need.