laptop problems

Looks like I'll be disappearing from the Internet for a while, which is not much of a loss considering how infrequently I update my blog. My computer has finally decided that it has suffered enough abuse from me and now it has totally crashed on me. There were signs, of course, which I noticed but chose to ignore. Despite having tried to reformat it three times in the brief hope of starting our "relationship" anew, it would't complete the reformatting process each time and would shut down having detected a "kernal_data_inpage error". Ok, I admit, I have totally no idea what that is. The people at the Murdoch IT helpdesk weren't of any help either (so maybe I feel slightly better for being ignorant?) and told me to have my hardware checked at a computer repair shop. When I asked where I could bring my laptop for repair, they couldn't give me a satisfactory answer, or even the name of ONE computer store in the vicinity! Where have all the computer hardware experts gone to?

So as it is, I do not even have an operating system on my laptop now. More things to do after my exams :_(

Help.