Death Star

So NSTAR was working on the power lines in our neighborhood on Friday night, and there was a scheduled power outage in the middle of the night. But there must have been some kind of a surge when the power came back on, because my desktop, which was off, and which has what I thought was a pretty hefty surge protector on it, turned itself on and apparently cooked its brains. It won't boot up now, it just freezes on the Windows welcome screen. I tried the limited repertoire of tricks I know: booting in Safe Mode and booting from the original Windows disks, but those just brought me to different screens to freeze on.

We had to be out the door on our way to Canadia (where I am now) and so I had to leave my baby in its busted state. Which felt like leaving a sick child; I fretted about it for most of the drive to Westport, thinking of all the things on my hard drive that aren't backed up anywhere else. (Oh, except for when we got caught in a blizzard on this crazy little back road near Booneville, New York, and I fretted about crashing the car and freezing to death.) Anyone have any ideas or advice on how to resurrect the thing, or at least retrieve my data? Or, if your only advice is to take it to a professional, anyone have any place or person they particularly recommend? It's a Gateway (yeah, I know) if that makes a difference, its warranty long since expired.

Edit: "It was the invisible pixies. They roll like that sometimes."