The hard drive of my computer is a bit like my closet. To the casual observer, it might look a bit like a whirlwind, a catch-all for everything I once needed or may possibly need again. Underneath the clutter, though, there is a divine order to it all. I know, for instance, that the last column I wrote was saved in my "Foreign Cultures 46" folder, even if you might think it would be in the folder marked "Columns." My last "Frank Lloyd Wright" paper is in that folder, right where I know to find it.

In the past few weeks, I had been feeling a little sorry for my poor computer. It was taking a little longer than usual to start up and I just assumed that it was weary from being stuffed to the gills with last year's term papers, items of interest from the web and old "to do" lists on electronic sticky-notes.

Then one night fateful last week I came home late and switched on my machine. When it did not spring to life right away, I figured it was just old age slowing it down and I puttered around my room for a few minutes while I waited for it to start. Rather than the familiar hum of the Cookie Monster start-up screen, though, there was silence. I glanced over and saw a blank gray screen, with a giant question mark blinking ominously.

Figuring there must be some mistake, I restarted it a number of times. I was no more successful than before, so I went to sleep, sure that after both the computer and I had a rest everything would be fine. However, the next morning, the screen was still blank. For the next day or so, I held extensive prayer rituals over the machine, and otherwise avoided my common room as much possible, not wanting to be in the same room with the dead animal.

Finally, I resolved to contact my house User Assistant. She was upbeat for awhile, but it soon became clear that the soul of my precious hard drive seemed to be gone. I took a deep breath and re-installed the system disks, effectively creating a blank slate. The next day, a friend was able to retrieve a few of the important files using "Disk Doctor" and a little magic. That took an hour, and sapped my will to keep trying.

These days, my machine is down to the bare minimum. For the first week since the crash, I just opened e-mail over the network, and left my hard drive blank-hoping that somehow the spirit of thing would return in the night and everything would be the way it used to be. A few days ago, I finally brought myself to install Word again, realizing that my teaching fellows would not exactly buy the excuse that I could not turn in my response paper because I was having a computer mourning period.

For awhile, the crash was all I could talk about. When I relayed the news to a friend, he likened my feelings to those at the end of a relationship. He claims that I do not want to rebuild too extensively for fear of losing it all again. So, for now, I guess that I won't be re-installing the bartending program, or Tetris, or even Excel. I have not even changed my sound back to the familiar "quack" from the default "simple beep." I am just too emotional right now to get too attached again.

As I have relayed my story over the past week, the most frequent comment I have heard is, "That's terrible! I'm so glad it didn't happen to me, though. My life is on my hard drive." Take it from someone who knows-keep at least some of your life off of the computer and you will be much happier in the long run.

So even though I would do almost anything to turn back the clock, maybe this purge has been good for me. Every closet-even mine-could use a good cleaning every once in awhile.

Corinne E. Funk's column appears on alternate Tuesdays.