My computer crashed and so did I.

What's the worst thing that can happen to someone who is "addicted" to having their computer "fix" each day?

Take away their computer.

I recently went through the traumatic experience of having the hard disk drive on my laptop crash.

"What? This just can't be happening to my computer!" I said out loud.

"Well, what did you expect?" My oldest son said to me. "You've left it turned on for the last two years."

I hesitated in my reply as the gravity of his sentence sunk in. He was right.

Come to think about it, I would turn off the monitor screen but I rarely turned off power to the computer itself. It was always on.

The computer was set to "hibernate" when not in use but I had disabled that . . . about two years ago.

I had lulled myself into a false sense of security, thinking my computer was invulnerable and would last forever.

On the encouraging side, I had made backups of my photos and word documents; the "unencouraging" side is the backups were made six months ago.

I took the laptop into the "computer place" and had a diagnostic check completed on it.

It was confirmed. The computer's hard drive was damaged and needed to be replaced.

It was possible the damage occurred from a recent electrical spike, or it just wore out from spinning. The computer place was not 100 percent sure.

I began thinking about the debate of leaving your computer on all the time versus powering it down when not using it.

I had come to believe it was better for a computer to be left on most of the time than it would be having its power turned off and on.

There was hope I might retrieve some of the lost files. I asked the computer place to run a "hard disk file recovery" program.

As the weekend approached, I faced it without my laptop computer.

I was now "de-computerized" and going through severe "where's my computer and Internet?" withdrawal symptoms.

I began to feel like the English singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse I almost had to "go to rehab . . . but I said no, no, no."

There I was sitting at my desk dumbfounded, staring at the spot where my computer should be.

Instead, a few scattered USB cables, a dusty printer, an unplugged external monitor, the mouse and a wireless keyboard silently stared back at me.

Your humble columnist was lost without his computer.

I gazed out my window and noticed the green leaves of some maple trees swaying in a gentle breeze against a

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