Computer crash

Well,I finally made it back. About 2 weeks ago my laptop,2000 model Sony Viao, crashed.I normally do my evening surfing in the living room while watching TV with my wife. When I went to start it up that night,as it finished loading,it showed a warning that a registry file was not loaded(or something like that).It said that Windows Registry Troubleshooter could repair it,so I clicked OK. Never had that come up before so WTH,I thought. After it finished,I was instructed to Restart,so I did. But when it came back up,it was like when I bought it a few years ago(used off eBay)and I had wiped the hard drive and reloaded the programs from the Rescue Discs. All my PDF files wouldn't open, MS Money was gone(year and a half of personal finances), Excel files wouldn't open except by opening Excel first(then open the file),firewall & virus programs not there along with anything else I had loaded since then. Now what! So I saved the PDF,Excel and Word files to a floppy(took a few times),transfering them to my desktop. Then back to the Rescue Discs to reformat the hard drive and start all over again. Then reload all the programs I had(I wrote them down before formatting). Finally I am back to normal,though I did loose most of my Fav sites.Still remembering them as the days go by and resaving them.Luckily I had balanced my checkbook the weekend before and backed it up to a floppy like I always do. Just hope that doesn't happen again for a long while. What a pain in the A@#, :angry: .