Why you shouldnt touch your Laptops LCD screen

[Kajuah]

http://gallery.photographyreview.com...edium/0341.JPG

It's a big imag, which i apologize for. I have no image editting software anymore.

2 days ago I was a little to eager to get on photography. review forums and I pressed the LCD screen of my 1500 $ laptop a little too hard. Shattered the crystals in the screen and rendered the OS inaccessiable. No external monitor, No backups, No external HD with any backups and no warranty coverage.

Result? Brand new gaming laptop straight in the bin...So I went out and bought one exactly like it for 1100.

It's a bit better, 3 gb of memory, 250 gb of HD. It's the one on the right if you haven't figured that out yet, has a slightly larger screen and more keys on the keyboard. Also running windows vista hp - hope nothing goes wrong.

What I'm mad about is losing all my files. This experience has taught me to BACK UP your files every freaking day.

Now I have no:

Files, documents, model release forums, references, contact numbers, address book, calendar of important dates

PHOTOS - all my photos gone, over a year's worth.

Photoshop cs3, lucis arts mod, noise ninja, photonaught, photomatix 3.0, lightroom 1.4, flash MX pro, paintshop pro, photoshop cs2, ACR

Odds and ends like videos that i can never get back, memories, photos of friends ill never be able to recover, friends who have moved on or past away - all gone.

Back up your harddrives. Forget about getting a 1TB drive unless you absolutely are a professional and shoot 21 mpx style RAW ALL the time for thousands of your photos you aren't going to need that much space. Instead; get 2 smaller 250 gb-500 gb Hard drives and hook them externally to your computer and back them up on a daily, if not a weekly, basis.

Do not touch your @#$%ing LCD screens.

[JSPhoto]

There are many ways you can recover the photos and so forth from that computer so don't toss it!

JS

[Kajuah]

this is true, im not tossing it just yet, was speaking figuratively. i'm trying to figure out just how exactly to extract the HD from the laptop computer .. i don't know at all how to do that or go about hooking it up or downloading the data off of it to begin with so I'm browsing google

if anyone has any experience with it then send me a reply

[JSPhoto]

One way is to remove the drive and put it in another computer with the same exact specs cpu and so forth then back it to an external drive.

Or you can replace the screen, there are many places you can find replacements...I replaced one twice lol

JS

[SmartWombat]

I use an external USB interface from Maplin.
Plugs into and SATA or IDE drive, I've recovered laptop drives that way.

Key thing is to make it a second drive so that you can read the data off it, but not try to boot another computer off it with all the wrong settings.
That way you can plug it into a desktop and get off all the data.

Or you can use a network drive case, takes one disk drive and shares it on your LAN as if it was a mini network server. Prices on those are going down and they're a cheap way to re-use that drive later if you have a house network