My laptop now seems to have given up completely. Last night it started making weird whirring and clicky noises, then blue screened (which is normal) and then I got a different blue screen saying 'unable to write to disk C'. Let it whirr/click away for a while, then realised that it wasn't going to fix itself, so turned it off and left it till the morning (in case the weird noises were caused by over heating). Tried to turn it on this morning and got the same weird noise combined with it being unable to find the operating system.

Bollocks. I've been intending to buy a new computer for ages, but I'd not anticipated it breaking quite like this. Unless there's some way to get it working again I'm going to have to recreate the pay data from April onwards and I'm going to have to have the payroll software on my new machine which I really don't want.

And this is ignoring the inconvenience of losing my email archive/other documents from January 2003 to date.

Anyone got any suggestions of things I could try to get it working?

For the forseeable future this means I'll only have internet access at work.