Laptop woes

Our laptop is not working.
When I turned it on this morning, I could see the operating system under some flickering jail-type bars in a rectangle in the middle of the screen. We knew the thing wasn't going to "fix itself", so I immediately took it in to the shop.
It's hard not having it here to do things on. I had been doing a lot of work on the laptop, going through all the "sent" messages in Outlook Express and when I started, the "sent" had over 800 messages in it, so it's obvious I never paid much attention to keeping that folder cleaned out. I am now down to 560 messages and these last ones will take longer because I want to make sure I have saved what we want saved. I've been mainly working on saving all the messages Guillermo and I sent each other while he was in South America. It gets confusing sometimes to go back and forth between my Word document and the emails, to see if this message is already saved or not, but I'm making headway. Guillermo keeps wanting me to be done so that we can sit and read all those emails together and I look forward to doing that, also. That's going to be a LOT of printing!!!!! But, nothing's going to be happening these next few days. I sure hope the shop calls tomorrow. In the meantime, Guillermo and I are sharing the computer that he always uses in his office (or if Rebeca is reading this - in Rebeca's room).