Sorry, guys. No comic today. I tried salvaging my desktop and it's been a slog.

Turns out I found my install disks and I called Dell to help walk me through it. The bad news is that it wasn't registering the prompt to rescue the drive from the CD, so I ended up having to reformat my entire hard drive. It's formatting as we speak, having taken the last 30 minutes to progress 3%. I'd be surprised if I didn't have to buy a new hard drive when it was all over.

I can probably use my laptop to complete my work. But right now, I'm too tired to make it work. Henry was sick over the weekend and he hasn't been quite right since. He used to sleep through the night. Now he's wide away at 4:00 in the morning. That, coupled with the worry about my machine last night led to practically no sleep. I'm running on fumes.

I might try to update Friday, but we'll just have to see how it goes.

All I know is that I'm glad I bought an external drive to house all my music, photos and video. I have a second internal hard drive for all the Theater Hopper stuff. So my original art will go untouched. But it's a close call.

I'm sitting here thinking about how good things were for Theater Hopper last year. The books, the conventions, the success. This year has been a real struggle. I can't help but think how much worse it could have been if I lost all my original artwork. I probably would have given up completely.

In the meantime, does anyone have suggestions for a reliable internal hard drive that I might set up my operating system on? Does anyone think I need to purchase a OS upgrade? The disks that came with my computer were from 2003. Thoughts?