well, my laptop is now fixed (very, very cheap by an IT guy from a huge business my roommate works for), and im finally back. the bad news is my hard drive could not be salvaged after the crash, so i lost everything on it...about 240 gb of memory. the good news, however, is i now have a fully working version of Windows 7 ULTIMATE on my laptop...and it is CRAZY awesome. the days of vista are finally over...hello windows 7!!!